Jean-Luc Godard is my second favorite filmmaker after Orson Welles. Band of Outsiders is one of my top ten films of all time, and Breathless, Alphaville, A Woman is a Woman are all close behind. I love his style, the roughness, the cinema-obsession, the romance, the politics. Contempt has hung out for a while on my DVDs to see list, and I bought it a few months ago blind because I had heard such good things. Watching 600 movies for the festival has pushed it back, but I finally caught up to it last night.
As much as I love the New Wave, Truffaut's Day for Night left me cold and I was worried about Godard's most explicit New Wave-era film about filmmaking. I watched Contempt and was shocked to see that it is really not about filmmaking hardly at all, and is instead an amazingly detailed look at a dissolving relationship, with moments so simply true that they are shocking.
In the end this is a minor note from Godard, one he clearly himself has issues with and one that doesn't come together as well as Breathless or Alphaville. Godard clearly demonstrates the axiom that bigger budgets don't mean better films. He needs the constraints of working on small films in order to say something large. Contempt is very good and very interesting but probably the least of the Godard films I have seen.
As much as I love the New Wave, Truffaut's Day for Night left me cold and I was worried about Godard's most explicit New Wave-era film about filmmaking. I watched Contempt and was shocked to see that it is really not about filmmaking hardly at all, and is instead an amazingly detailed look at a dissolving relationship, with moments so simply true that they are shocking.
In the end this is a minor note from Godard, one he clearly himself has issues with and one that doesn't come together as well as Breathless or Alphaville. Godard clearly demonstrates the axiom that bigger budgets don't mean better films. He needs the constraints of working on small films in order to say something large. Contempt is very good and very interesting but probably the least of the Godard films I have seen.
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