Contempt (3 Stars)

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) occupies a strange and fascinating place in Brigitte Bardot's career; it is both a culmination of her star image and a deliberate dismantling of it.

By the early 1960s Bardot was arguably the most famous woman in the world, a symbol of sexual freedom forged through films like And God Created Woman. Producers expected her to sell films through her body and her availability; Godard, reluctantly accommodating those expectations, opens Contempt with the notorious nude scene. Yet even here the film signals its intent. The scene is cool, interrogative, almost clinical; Bardot's Camille asks her husband which parts of her body he loves, turning erotic display into a questionnaire about desire and ownership. This is Bardot the icon being examined rather than celebrated.

As the film progresses, Bardot's performance becomes one of her most controlled and tragic. Camille is not the carefree sex symbol audiences expected, but a woman retreating into silence and resentment, her emotional withdrawal mirrored by Godard's austere compositions. Bardot strips away charm and spontaneity in favour of something harder and more brittle; contempt itself becomes her defining expression. In the context of her career, this is striking. Few of Bardot's other roles allow her such interiority, or ask her to play emotional annihilation rather than erotic vitality.

Contempt also reflects the pressures Bardot faced as a star trapped between art and commerce. The film's story of a marriage corroded by compromise echoes Bardot's own uneasy relationship with the film industry, which demanded constant availability while rarely granting artistic respect. Godard uses her presence to critique the very system that made her famous; Bardot becomes both the commodity and the victim of commodification.

In retrospect, Contempt stands as one of Bardot's most important films, not because it confirms her myth, but because it challenges it. Where much of her career traded on immediacy and physical allure, Godard freezes her into an image of loss and disillusionment. It is a reminder that Bardot was capable of far more than the roles that defined her public persona, and that her greatest performance may be the one that most openly mourns the cost of being Brigitte Bardot.