‘Contempt’: On the Big Screen, Jean-Luc Godard’s Tragic Romance

“Contempt” is based on Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel about a man whose wife begins to despise him, but it echoes with allusions, quotations and references to its own making. It opens with Godard’s voice reading the credits as Georges Delerue’s mournful, romantic score begins and the cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, is seen filming a tracking shot. Capturing settings in Rome and Capri in widescreen and a palette dominated by vivid reds, yellows and blues, it shows Godard to be one of the medium’s great colorists. Its beauty can be appreciated anew on its 60th anniversary in a 4K restoration by StudioCanal opening at Film Forum in New York on June 30, before playing in other North American cities.

Godard created one of the most exquisite passages—a prologue filmed with color filters—when the producers wanted more nude shots of megastar Brigitte Bardot, who plays Paul’s wife, Camille. As they embrace in a stylized marital Eden, Camille solicits Paul’s opinion on parts of her body, as if offering them for sale. He says he loves her “totally, tenderly, tragically.” She gently affirms her feelings.

The story then begins at Cinecittà Studios—deserted, reflecting an industry in crisis—where Prokosch discusses, through his interpreter ( Giorgia Moll ), hiring Paul, a playwright and former crime novelist working on screenplays, to rewrite an adaptation of “The Odyssey” being directed by Fritz Lang. Moravia’s narrator describes the director in the book, Rheingold, as “certainly not in the same class as the Pabsts and Langs.” In Godard’s film, the great Lang, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, plays himself, and is a beacon of integrity.

In a projection room, Lang presides over a viewing of dailies, including shots of classical sculpture that are stirring in their simplicity—and infuriating to Prokosch, who envisioned something different from Lang’s script. “Finally you get the feel of Greek culture,” Lang says sardonically, after the producer hurls a film can like a discus. “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I bring out my checkbook,” Prokosch replies, writing Paul a check. Lang grimly recalls that the Nazis used to say “revolver” instead of “checkbook.” During the screening, Paul seems troubled by Prokosch’s speculation that Penelope was unfaithful. Anxieties about his marriage will shape his own interpretations of Homer.

After the radiant Camille comes to meet Paul, Prokosch invites them to his villa outside Rome for a drink, pressuring her to ride in his red Alfa Romeo, a gleaming comic-book chariot, while Paul, ignoring her discomfort, agrees to take a taxi. When he arrives late, he finds his wife withdrawn.

If cinema, in the form of a director’s artistry, is under attack in the projection-room scene, Paul and Camille’s new apartment—still being painted—where the second act unfolds, is the site of a more intimate battle. Its decor includes a life-size statue of a girl with a downcast gaze, a shadow Camille. They do ordinary things for a waning day—bathing, changing, discussing dinner—but the scene distills a relationship’s deterioration. Paul badgers Camille about her changed mood and whether they should accept an invitation to stay with Prokosch in Capri.

Camille finally admits she no longer loves Paul, in a sequence where the camera tracks back and forth between them as they sit on either side of a lamp he tensely switches on and off. He accuses her of having feigned affection so he’ll finish paying for the apartment. She says, “How can you know what I think?”

Their situation having become more hopeless, they leave—dusk falling like a blue curtain—to meet Prokosch and Lang at a movie theater for a stage show where the producer wants to see a singer he might cast as Nausicaa. The film on the marquee is Roberto Rossellini’s

The widescreen compositions take on a breathtaking splendor in Capri, where scenes for “The Odyssey” are being filmed. Paul and Camille are staying in Casa Malaparte, a modernist landmark resembling both a ship and a temple with steps leading to the sky. Paul again encourages Camille to go off alone with Prokosch, and her departure from a shooting location in a boat with the producer is uncannily beautiful. Paul realizes his mistakes too late. She meets her fate in Prokosch’s car, her death as exaggerated as a passage from a pulp novel.

The conclusion of Godard’s tale, which he called one of “castaways of the Western world, survivors of the shipwreck of modernity,” finds Lang still filming “The Odyssey,” close to the natural world with which the ancient Greeks lived in greater harmony. The final image in “Contempt” is of the vast, shimmering sea.

—Ms. Jones writes about film and culture for the Journal.