Le Mépris (1963)

Disillusion in love and cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s most opulent and emotive production, with lovers and film legends at loggerheads in Capri.

Working with his biggest budget to date, Jean-Luc Godard created a sublime widescreen drama about marital breakdown, set during pre-production on a film shoot.

Famously, producer Carlo Ponti was disappointed that Jean-Luc Godard’s adaptation of the Alberto Moravia’s novel A Ghost at Noon contained no nude shots of star Brigitte Bardot. With typical perversity, Godard compromised by adding an explicit scene of Camille (Bardot) naked on a bed as screenwriter-husband Paul (Michel Piccoli) lists her attractive features. The anecdote is appropriate for a film that features an American film producer (Jack Palance) exerting his crass influence over the Grecian epic being made by German genius Fritz Lang (playing himself).

While filled with playful cinematic references, Le Mépris is perhaps Godard’s most emotionally direct film, particularly intense in the long central apartment scene – masterfully shot by Raoul Coutard – in which the fractures in Paul and Camille’s marriage come to seem irreversible.

“Godard’s finest film is a deeply cynical study of the loss of artistic integrity and the loss of respect that comes from it, a warning to every artist who chooses to sell out for financial gain.” David Flint

“The ideal balance between a Godard work’s self-reflexivity and its penchant for the elegiac and transcendent. It’s at once a send-up of the institution of cinema and, somehow, a meditation on love and art’s profound mysteries.” Rielle Navitski

“The schematic beauty of the colours and the detached acting of the actors, in contrast to the lyricism of the music, make Le Mépris an obsessive story.” François Jost

1963 France, Italy
Directed by
Jean-Luc Godard
Produced by
Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti
Written by
Jean-Luc Godard
Featuring
Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance
Running time
103 minutes

Ranked in The Greatest Films of All Time poll

Sight and Sound

Who voted for Le Mépris

Critics

Saleem Albeik
Palestine/France
Thomas Allenbach
Switzerland
Hervé Aubron
France
Nemanja Becanovic
Montenegro
João Pedro Bénard
Portugal
Rod Bishop
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Nick Bradshaw
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Erdem Murat Çelikler
Turkey
Lina Chaabane
Tunisia
Ian Christie
UK
Robert Daudelin
Canada
Beatrice Fiorentino
Italy
David Flint
UK
Stefan Grissemann
Austria
Hauvick Habéchian
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Juliet Jacques
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Aleksandar S. Janković
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François Jost
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Andreas Kilb
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Peter Körte
Germany
Jan Langlo
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Eric Le Roy
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Anke Leweke
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Phillip Lopate
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Carlos Losilla
Spain
Miguel Angel Martín Maestro
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Todd McCarthy
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Jamie McLeish
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Petar Milat
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David Morrison
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Mark Naglazas
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Rielle Navitski
USA
Olivier Père
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Pablo Piedras
Argentina
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Martin Rubin
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Rüdiger Suchsland
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Andreas Thein
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Janice Tong
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Daniela Turco
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Grégory Valens
France
Ginette Vincendeau
France/UK

Directors

Richard Ayoade
UK
Nina Danino
UK
Julie Delpy
France
Grant Gee
UK
Amos Gitai
Israel/France
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Mexico
Neil Jordan
Ireland
Mladen Kovačević
Serbia
Pia Marais
South Africa/Germany
Steve McQueen
UK
Rudolf Thome
Germany
Klaus Wyborny
Germany
Florian Zeller
France

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