Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		0.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.5

Le Mépris 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 1, 2023

The following is said with la langue planted pretty firmly dans la joue, but the fact that this new 4K UHD edition of Le Mépris does not include any of the quasi-making of bonus features that Lionsgate's way old 1080 release from well over a decade ago did may not be as much of a deal breaker as might be assumed, since the best "making of" documentary for this film is the film itself. While Colin McCabe, whose introduction is the only previously produced supplement ported over to this release, starts out his comments with the questionable assertion that Le Mépris is "Godard's best known film" (I'd personally assign Breathless to that particular position), Le Mépris is at least arguably Godard's most relentlessly "meta" offering, which in and of itself is kind of fascinating, given the deconstructionist ethos that Godard in particular tended to bring to the Nouvelle Vague. Le Mépris itself depicts the production of a film, in this case a supposed reworking of the Odyssey, which is being helmed by none other than the legendary Fritz Lang (supposedly playing a "character" named Fritz Lang, but that's just one salient example of Godard's meta-physics in this film). Lang has chafed repeatedly with the film's American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), who is, to borrow the title of another film made around this same time, the very model of a modern Ugly American. Prokosch approaches French writer Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) to do some "script doctoring", but rather unexpectedly the lucrative (for Javal) hire comes with a price: his gorgeous wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) doesn't approve of the way her husband bows down and submits to Prokosch, and the couple soon find themselves estranged, though motivations are left somewhat opaque.

In my now way old Psycho Blu-ray review of Alfred Hitchcock's immortal masterpiece, I started my comments by mentioning how two titans of contemporary cinema took huge risks in 1960, with Hitch and that film being one, and Michael Powell and Peeping Tom being the other. Hitch found his career reinvigorated by the former, but the latter pretty much effectively, well, killed Powell's career, at least for a little while. But both films address voyeurism in their own way, obviously drawing a subliminal link to the very act of watching a movie. Godard takes that idea and runs with it in the film's very opening sequence, which offers the credits being narrated (at least in the original French language version), while a camera crew is working on a tracking shot, which ends with the director of photography aiming his lens right at Godard's (or, more appropriately, Raoul Coutard's) camera, as if the viewer is going to be subsumed the camera being shown, like a veritable Alice in Wonderland traipsing down that well known rabbit hole.

While I joked about this 4K UHD disc not offering most of the supplemental features on the old 1080 disc, in a way, some of those bonus items really help to contextualize things and give some elements of Le Mépris at least a bit more clarity. This was a hugely budgeted affair (McCabe suggests it was easily Godard's most lavishly appointed film), but Godard found himself, much like Lang with Prokosch in the "production within a production", engaged in some testy ripostes with American producer Joseph E. Levine, a man not exactly renowned for offering "highbrow" entertainments, though he certainly could, as with this film and other offerings like Two Women, which he distributed, and The Lion in Winter and Carnal Knowledge , both of which he produced. (One of my unabashed guilty pleasures in the "Levine schlock" department in 1966's The Oscar, mostly for its glorious Percy Faith score.)

Levine, whatever his perceived shortcomings may have been (those interested should look into his celebrated and litigious "feud" with Carroll Baker over Harlow), he at least seemed to be rather well attuned to what the so-called movie going public wanted, and I think even diehard Godard fans might be willing to admit (perhaps under duress) that "pleasing the unwashed masses" wasn't always at the head of Godard's "to do list". But that very dialectic plays into another subtext of Le Mépris, which might be a more generalized cinematic equivalent of Norma Desmond's immortal "we had faces then" remark in Sunset Boulevard. This is in its own way an homage to a bygone age (and I don't mean Ancient Greece), with the dissolution of the marriage between Paul and Camille some perhaps "collateral damage" to the end, or at least diminution, of the film industry itself.

Casey Broadwater's excellent Contempt Blu-ray review of the older 1080 release provides more plot information and some appealing analysis.

Le Mépris 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Note: Screenshots are sourced from Lionsgate's now ancient standalone 1080 release. This release does not include a 1080 disc, though Amazon is commendably offering a Le Mepris 4K + BD bundle that I actually recommend to those who want the excellent supplements on the 1080 disc, but also so they can see just how improved this new 4K UHD version really is.

Le Mépris is presented in 4K UHD courtesy of Lionsgate and StudioCanal with an HVEC / H.265 encoded 2160p transfer in 2.35:1*. Some opening text cards provide the following information:

The film was restored and digitalized in 4K by StudioCanal from 2021 to 2023 at Hiventy with support from the CNC. In order to optimize the 4K restoration, the original 35mm negative and scenes from the interpositive were used along with the reference print reworked in 2002 by Mr. Raoul Coutard, the film's director of photography. The previous digital versions showed a lack of detail in high and low light. Furthermore, the colors deviated from the director's specifications. Thanks to documented information, the original contrasts, details and saturation were restored. The project was supervised by the StudioCanal team, Sophie Boyer and Jean-Pierre Bolget.

Some wise man (wise guy?) might say 2023 ain't 2010, and my hunch is Casey might not have granted the old 1080 release as much slack if he were reviewing it today. The changes (meaning manifest improvements) to the palette in this new 4K UHD version are almost gobsmacking in a way. For those who have the old 1080 release, colors were often weirdly skewed so that, for example, Prokosch's supposedly bright red sports car is more of a pumpkin orange, a quality that carries over to other red tones throughout the 1080 presentation. Here, though, primaries in particular are gorgeously saturated and more importantly, "correct" looking, in that reds are reds, though of course HDR and/or Dolby Vision can add any number of highlights to the mix. Densities are improved throughout, and maybe just a little surprisingly, detail levels remain nicely consistent even given some of the grading and/or filtering choices Godard and Coutard made, as in the opening scene with Paul and Camille in bed. In the 1080 version, the blue filters add a pretty noisy, pixellated appearance, which is at least ameliorated now if not completely removed. Fine detail also sees some noticeable improvements, to the level that you can almost count by number the downy hairs on the back of Bardot's legs in some of her quasi-nude scenes (one of those elements Levine evidently insisted on). Grain is healthy and organic looking, though it can occasionally get pretty splotchy and yellow, as in the first scene in the screening room with Lang, Prokosch and Paul. Kind of interestingly, later interior scenes shot against similarly white or brighter backgrounds don't show this same level of grittiness. My score is 4.75.

*The 1080 release was 2.33:1, and since I'm not able to easily measure pixels on a 4K UHD disc, I used the completely nonscientific method of comparing the width of the black bars between the 1080 and 4K UHD versions, and it looks to me like this is being offered in "true" 2.35:1.

Le Mépris 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Le Mépris features DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono tracks in either French or English which struck my ears as interchangeable with the tracks on the older 1080 disc. Fidelity is fine throughout, offering good support for the kind of comically multi-lingual affair (French, German and English dot both tracks, despite their ostensible "language"). Georges Delerue provides another really lush score, with one repeated string motif sounding like he had been listening to Albinoni. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. Optional English subtitles are available.

Le Mépris 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Introduction by Colin MacCabe (HD, 5:31)

Additionally, a digital copy is included.

Le Mépris 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I mentioned the inimitable Alfred Hitchcock above, and fans will no doubt know of his far ranging conversations with François Truffaut, and in that regard one of the fascinating supplements that was on the 1080 disc which sadly hasn't been included here is a conversation between Godard and Fritz Lang. The absence of the previously produced supplements is really the only major negative to this release, which otherwise offers noticeably improved video and the same excellent audio that graced the 1080 release. Highly recommended.