Contempt

Bardot and Piccoli are deeply sympathetic as a couple in free fall, the locations are invariably stunning and the score by Georges Delerue is so heartbreaking and epic that Scorsese borrowed it, re-using it with equal power in Casino.

Godard, himself working with American co-producers and facing demands to insert nude shots of Bardot (whose fees constituted half the film’s budget), turns this conflict between culture and cash into an ironic, self-reflexive odyssey.

Contempt could not be termed good or poor. It seems a little remote, and unless you are interested in films, or want to view some beautiful scenes of tasteful sensuality, you can pass it by.

"Contempt" transports us back to another era: an early '60s world in which the classicism of the past...is juxtaposed with the emptiness and ennui of modern culture.

The film is about nothing but cinema itself, which gets a bit wearing, unless you are one of those people who like watching a movie in order to check off the references to other movies. Still, it's a masterwork of some sort.

Steeped in melancholy and a sense of mourning.

60 years on from its initial release, Jean-Luc Godard’s elegant and layered Le Mépris (Contempt) remains a landmark achievement in his career and the French New Wave.

Iconoclastic, Godard reinterprets formulaic cinema and creates his own idiosyncratic technical and thematic approach.

Contempt is a daunting and formally labyrinthine work, calling its own fallibility to question even as it submits completely to the romance of cinema.

Trust Jean-Luc Godard to make a big-budget movie meant to be more mainstream than his usual fare and then turn it into a look at the raging battle between art and commerce.