[6] It follows a playwright, Paul Javal, whose marriage begins to fall apart during the troubled production of a film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.

Paul Javal, a young French playwright who has achieved commercial success in Rome, accepts an offer from Jerry Prokosch, a vulgar American producer, to rework the script for German director Fritz Lang's screen adaptation of the Odyssey.

Prokosch and Lang are locked in a conflict over the correct interpretation of Homer's work, a stalemate exacerbated by the difficulty of communication between the German director, the French screenwriter, and the American producer.

When Paul sides with Prokosch against Lang by suggesting that Odysseus left home because of his wife's infidelity, Camille's suspicions of her husband's servility are confirmed.

Paul denies this accusation, offering to sever his ties with the film and leave Capri, but Camille refuses to recant and departs for Rome with the producer.

Anna Karina (by then Godard's former wife) later revealed that the director had traveled to Rome to ask Monica Vitti if she would portray the female lead.

Bardot visibly reads a book about Fritz Lang that was written by Moullet, and Rozier made the documentary short about the making of the film Le Parti des Choses.

[4] Contempt was filmed in Italy where it is set, with location shooting at the Cinecittà studios in Rome and the Casa Malaparte on Capri island.

According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, Godard was also directly influenced by Jean-Daniel Pollet and Volker Schlöndorff's Méditerranée, released earlier the same year.

The site's critical consensus reads: "This powerful work of essential cinema joins 'meta' with 'physique,' casting Brigitte Bardot and director Godard's inspiration Fritz Lang.

"[14] French journalist Antoine de Gaudemar made a one-hour documentary in 2009 about Contempt, Il était une fois...

In February 2012, Interiors, an online journal that is concerned with the relationship between architecture and film, released an issue that discussed how space is used in this scene.