I Know What I'm Doing for My Birthday This Year

Oh, man.  The first time I saw Contempt, I was literally slack-jawed by the time it was over.  Not only was it visually mesmerizing, but it was engaging in a way I'd never experienced with a movie before, as if this movie about the dissolution of a relationship actually was the dissolution of a relationship that I was in.  That's what was so stunning about it; the narrative itself was almost (but not quite) beside the point.  Instead, what it offered was a sort of communication between the director and viewer about the experience of directing and watching movies.  Only, not in a "we're-in-on-the-same-joke-aren't-we-clever" kind of postmodern way.  Rather, in a "directors-and-viewers-are-actually-humans-and-we-have-an-actual-relationship-even-if-you're-distracted-from-it-by-the-story" kind of way.  I was (and am) not a particularly sophisticated viewer in terms of film history or theory, yet picked up on this very quickly; it was unmistakable.  I was emotionally wrung out by the end of the famous long apartment scene, but still ached for all that beauty onscreen -- of Bardot, of the Mediterranean, of the Modernist dream embodied in the Villa Malaparte, of a thrilling era that I just missed -- just like you might ache for the body of a lover long after you know the relationship's doomed.  I would actually catch myself holding my breath at times while I watched.

Damn, what a movie.  And that was when I saw it on the small screen...