Nouvelles Femmes: Contempt
October 7, 2026
A film producer (Jack Palance) and his director (pantheon director Fritz Lang) are filming Homer’s The Odyssey. The screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his stunning wife (Brigitte Bardot) are on the scene. Godard seeks to “film thought, the beauty of moments,” and a small emotional miscalculation (or happenstance) sows doubt in a Mediterranean paradise.
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Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Before Jean-Luc Godard and Francçois Truffaut made their own films, they wrote as film critics, "Brigitte Bardot symbolizes a new side of a new French generation, the postwar freedom and sexual independence of women.” French culture has revered the female form for centuries; the Republic is a female noun; postage stamps are adorned with nude paintings and sculptures; the country’s symbol is Marianne, who has been sculpted as Brigitte Bardot; in the 1960s her name was one of the most referenced search terms worldwide. Contempt opens with Camille (Bardot) naked in bed with her husband Paul (Michel Piccoli) playfully enumerating her physical beauties, which echoes an age-old French poetic tradition. It’s a happy, mutually loving moment against which the advancing film is measured. Paul is a screenwriter, and the couple goes South to join a film production on the Mediterranean. The director is god of cinema Fritz Lang (Metropolis), the producer is boorish Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance). The film is Homer’s Odyssey (beating Christopher Nolan by six decades), in which fate, chance and free will drive the action and influence choices. When Jerry offers Camille a ride to his villa in his two-seat roadster, she wants her husband to say no, but he doesn’t, fostering marital misunderstanding, doubt and distrust. Camille and Paul’s discord blossoms in a famous sequence where making a simple decision becomes a room-to-room spectacle of push-pull emotions. Amidst the luscious natural beauty of the land where Drama was born, tensions created must be released. Martin Scorsese, who used Contempt’s poignant music in his film Casino, calls the film “brilliant, romantic, genuinely tragic, and also one of the greatest films about filmmaking.” Bardot is radiant as the sun, Fritz Lang is the voice of wisdom, ancient statues comment silently, the mechanics of shooting scenes are sacred, almost mythic rituals. Between sea and sky, Godard plays Lang’s assistant, calling for “Silence”.
- Director: Jean-Luc Godard
- Principal Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Pinnoli, Jack Palance, Giogina Moll, Fritz Lang
- Country: France
- Year: 1963
- Running Time: 102 min.
- Producer: Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti
- Screenplay: Alberto Moravia
- Cinematographers: Raoul Coutard
- Editors: Agnès Guillemot
- Music: Geroges Delerue, Piero Piccioni
- Language: French
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- US Distributor: Rialto Pictures