Contempt

Predictably underwhelming, Contempt follows screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) as he’s forced to face the end of his marriage to Brigitte Bardot’s Camille during the filming of a Roman epic – with Camille’s growing closeness to said epic’s pompous producer (Jack Palance’s Jeremy) only complicating the issue. Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard delivers a meandering and mostly uninvolving drama that admittedly does get off to a rather promising start, as Contempt kicks off with a relatively compelling opening stretch detailing the characters’ movie-within-the-movie, behind-the-scenes exploits – with the effectiveness of these scenes heightened by the engaging, charismatic work of the various actors. (It helps, certainly, that Godard has crafted actual characters for his performers to inhabit, which is far from common within the avant-garde director’s filmography.) It’s clear, then, that Contempt begins its transformation into trying cinematic experience as it lumbers into a talky and egregiously deliberate midsection, with Godard obliterating any established momentum by emphasizing a long, tedious sequence focused on a banal and entirely circular conversation between Piccoli and Bardot’s respective characters. The remainder of the picture has similarly been suffused with long, painfully drawn-out interludes that are wholly unable to pack the trenchant punch Godard has presumably intended, which ensures that Contempt, by the time it arrives at its endless third act, has cemented its place as just another in a long line of irrelevant efforts from a seriously lackluster filmmaker.

*1/2 out of ****