Contempt (1963) on Netflix
Playwright Paul Javal is hired by producer Jeremy Prokosch to rework a veteran director's script of the Odyssey. Prokosch offers Paul's wife Camille a ride, and Paul lets her go alone.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.4/1039,746 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Screenwriter Paul Javal's marriage to his wife Camille disintegrates during movie production as she spends time with the producer. Layered conflicts between art and business ensue.
—Noossab
Paul Javal is a writer who is hired to make a script for a new movie about Ulysses more commercial, which is to be directed by Fritz Lang and produced by Jeremy Prokosch. But because he let his wife Camille drive with Prokosch and he is late, she believes, he uses her as a sort of present for Prokosch to get get a better payment. So the relationship ends.
—Stephan Eichenberg
Not satisfied with the script for his new movie, producer Jeremy Prokosch hires screenwriter Paul Javal to write a new one. Javal seems oblivious to Prokosch's obvious interest in Javal's pretty wife Camille. As Javal becomes ever more engrossed in writing the screenplay, Camille comes to resent him, thinking her husband is pushing her into the producer's arms for his own benefit. When they finally talk about it he flatly denies having done any such thing but for Camille, their relationship is irreparably damaged.
—garykmcd
After a solemn declaration of love, devotion, and everlasting adoration, the financially hard-pressed French playwright, Paul Javal, asks his beautiful, but so insecure, young wife, Camille, to join him on a trip to Cinecittà.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Contempt (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Godard wanted Kim Novak and Frank Sinatra for the leads of his adaptation of Alberto Moravia's novel Il disprezzo, but both refused. Producer Carlo Ponti then proposed Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, and Godard turned them down.
- Anna Karina, Godard's former wife, revealed that he travelled to Rome to ask Monica Vitti to play the female lead, but the Italian actress turned up an hour late, "staring out the window like she wasn't interested at all".
- Godard shot Contempt's opening scene, a mockery of the cinema business with tame nudity, only after he considered the film finished, because the American co-producers insisted on it.
- Godard rewrote Alberto Moravia's novel with the author's consent, squeezing the action into a few days and making the screenwriter less "silly and soft", saying he made him "more American—something like a Humphrey Bogart type".
- Godard filmed the long apartment argument between Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot as an extended series of tracking shots, in natural light and in near real-time.
- The song "Thème de Camille", originally composed for Contempt, was later used as a main theme in the 1995 film Casino.
