As Prince sang, “all the critics love you in New York,” and for Jean-Luc Godard it rings true. The city’s film pundits (my colleague Bruce Bennett notably excepted) love nothing better than vintage Godard. His 1963 “Contempt” may be his most critically adored film, if not close to the most critically adored film of the last half-century. It demands a proper platform, and while you can buy a deluxe DVD from Criterion, it’s not often revived.

About 25 years ago, I made a VHS copy of the movie taped from a late-night broadcast on a Rochester, N.Y., UHF station (remember UHF?), and was never more than mildly amused by its circumlocutions of what it means to be “totally, tenderly, tragically” in love: with star Brigitte Bardot, with “the cinema,” with Raoul Coutard’s elegant tracking shots of deserted Cinecittà back lots and the breathtaking location footage on the isle of Capri.

Film Forum’s new 35 mm print of the film, which was previously shown at the venue in 2003, changes all that. It is, of course, delicious as both pop art and artifact, a tainted evocation of early ’60s European chic just across the piazza and yet whole sensibilities away from Fellini and Antonioni. It’s also briskly indulgent filmmaking. The expanse of the CinemaScope frame is luxury itself, though Fritz Lang — playing himself, as a director hired by a vulgar American producer (Jack Palance) to shoot a new version of “The Odyssey” — dismisses it as unfit for lensing humans: “Just for snakes and funerals.” Mr. Godard’s contagious use of ultra-vivid primary colors (red, blue) established a signature here, though the running cinephile in-jokes had been a trope since “Breathless.”

Despite all the reverent blather heaped upon it, “Contempt” is best appreciated as a perverse and sanguine comedy, its punch lines etched in acid, its quick-draw dialogue as lithe and balletic as Muhammad Ali in his prime.

Jeremy Prokosch, Palance’s Yankee producer, is a strutting parody of a soulless Hollywood moneyman who views art as nothing but commodity: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my checkbook,” he says, revising a comment usually attributed to Hermann Göring. The rudderless, would-be intellectual screenwriter Paul (Michel Piccoli) is sucked into Prokosch’s whirlpool and, perhaps without even realizing it, subtly encourages his young wife (Ms. Bardot, at her most sex-kittenish, portraying a “stupid typist”) to untether herself from their bond. The allusions to Greek myth and Hollywood chicanery, oceanic sweep and petrochemical tragedy, Dean Martin and the derriere (B.B.’s) that launched untold celluloid fantasies make “Contempt” the kind of movie a Quentin Tarantino could re-enact from memory. When a flirty Ms. Bardot bids the wolfish Mr. Palance to “get into my Alfa, Romeo,” it becomes as indelibly stitched there as a Motown lyric.