“Those who can, do,” goes the proverb. “Those who can’t, teach.” In 1962, Jean-Luc Godard was given an opportunity to helm an adaptation of Italian novelist Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel “Il Disprezzo,” by producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine. But instead of delivering the star-driven international production the producers expected, Mr. Godard chose to bite the gold Rolex-bearing hand that feeds and teach his backers, cast, and crew a lesson by making a brightly colored and inscrutable turkey of a film basted in the cloying, self-indulgent butter of pointless homages, narcissism, and misogyny. Mr. Godard had, an assistant on the troubled Italian shoot recalled, a “knack for making people around him feel awkward.” Though lionized by critics and championed by filmmakers for decades as Godard’s greatest film, “Contempt” is far and away the most awkward, cravenly self-hating, and, well, contemptible movie of its maker’s career.

From an opening scene in which husband and wife Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot interminably inventory their fading attraction to each other, “Contempt” is a symphony of false emotional notes and witless and condescending attacks on easy targets. It’s no surprise that the film only ever comes to life when director Fritz Lang plays himself onscreen. Clearly, he is the only person in the film Mr. Godard loves “totally, tenderly, tragically,” in the oft-quoted words of Mr. Piccoli’s tormented screenwriter character. The rest of the time, particularly in Mr. Piccoli and Ms. Bardot’s scenes together, “Contempt” is an excruciatingly joyless exercise in glossy cinematic miserablism perpetrated by an artist who is more at home with ideas and with other movies than with people and emotions.

Mr. Godard is many things to many cineastes, but it’s unlikely that any of his legions of fans, acolytes, and imitators would accuse him of being a master storyteller. Quite the contrary, Mr. Godard’s champions praise the director’s disdain for story formula and an audience’s needs. And yet from Homer to Vincente Minnelli, the script for “Contempt” constantly drops the names of superior artists who, unlike Mr. Godard, hold their characters and audience in equal esteem and are capable of crafting an emotionally honest and lucid narrative. Another filmmaker might have approached the potentially insurmountable problem of how to escape the unrealistic and crass demands of the producers of “Contempt” artistically intact. Instead, Mr. Godard created a dulling fan boy’s tantrum in which women are the weak-willed, vapid, and yet unknowable other. Though legend has it that the fictional marriage portrayed in “Contempt” mirrored Mr. Godard’s unhappy union with actress Anna Karina, the film’s treatment of Ms. Bardot’s character is infused with a caustic, embarrassing, and infantile bitterness that likely stretches back to the nursery.

If one were to search for the key film that laid the groundwork for today’s generation of pretentious emotional latchkey children filmmakers — writer/directors who create not within the focusing contours of human nature, but through masturbatory fascination with their own influences and precocious “it’s cool ’cause I’m doing it” acts of modernism — “Contempt” would be a wise place to start.

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