Off-Course Odyssey

Contempt is doodling disguised as art. French Director Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, My Life to Live) has built a reputation as an improviser who makes up masterpieces as he goes along. In this inflated drama of marital disintegration, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, spontaneity looks more like slackness. Contempt subjects Godard's staunchest admirers to a loyalty test that precious few will pass.

Moravia's story describes the plight of a frustrated Italian screenwriter whose wife no longer loves him. Hired to write a film version of the Odyssey, he sees his wife being seduced by the producer and drifts into complex psychoanalogies about Ulysses, the loyal Penelope and her pernicious suitors.

Godard muddles an already tricky narrative with personal mannerisms and outright irrelevancies. Brigitte Bardot is a sullen enigma as the wife, and Michel Piccoli as the husband is merely opaque. Hollywood's Jack Palance makes the producer seem to be none other than Jack Palance.

Contempt is decorated with posters advertising other films that Godard admires, and shots of paint-daubed statuary are inserted at intervals, presumably to suggest that a red-eyed Minerva gazes upon the 20th century with something less than Homeric tranquillity. The film's pretensions often make way for the most extravagant display of Bardot nudity yet seen. She appears nude in red light, blue light, and on a bearskin rug. "Do you like my ankles?" she purrs. "My knees? Thighs?" The question seems oddly beside the point for a director ostensibly contemplating the bust of Homer.

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