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Masturbation and masterpieces, isn’t there room for both in the movies? While there’s a new James Bond film opening today, with all the expected ridiculousness, and Criterion has a long-awaited DVD release of some sublime, Jean-Luc Godard’s acidulous dissection of marital love, Contempt.

First, the foolishness.  At the age of 40, James Bond’s in the midst of a colorful midlife crisis, but at least in Die Another Day, partner-in-smirk Halle Berry can hold her own again Pierce Brosnan's increasingly craggy air. Their interplay doesn’t strike memorable sparks, but they’re both pleasant to watch, which was especially important at the press screening I caught. The print on show had some of the crispest music and sound effects I’ve heard in ages, yet the dialogue was often nearly inaudible. There’s always been hope that the Broccoli family that owns the franchise would bring the extremely profitable series into the modern age, but they’ve always seemed content to attain a high level of mediocrity rather than make truly memorable entertainment or, God forbid, art. I’m no particular fan of the series, and thinking about the movies over the weekend, I couldn’t remember plots, locations, quips, from the last four or five. (So much for fanboy cred.)

While Die Another Day doesn’t do anything so radical as hire Johnny Jude Law to be Bond, or David Fincher to direct, its descent into strange science-fiction territory is an interesting step sideways. The James Bond pictures always seem from another time, or more properly, of no time at all, divorced from the era of the Ian Fleming novels and from the other movies of any given year. What's freshest about this installment is Brosnan being given the chance to draw on the darker side of his personality, and the game voluptuousness of Berry as an American spy whose derring he does, or vice versa: they’re equally sassy. (Except, of course, when someone winds up calling a woman a "bitch," Berry gets the swear.)

The opening, set in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea, has a grittiness and spatial coherence that’s rare in the canon of generally overproduced Bond stunts. (Heavily armed hovercrafts are the zoomy vehicles of choice.) Tortured by North Koreans under the main credits--dripping translucent female forms gyrate atop his suffering--Bond is held captive for fourteen months before being released, long-haired and shaggy-bearded, to accusations of being a traitor. So far, so peculiar. His powerlessness is compounded once M (Judi Dench) pulls his license to kill; now a rogue male, he circles the globe--Hong Kong, Cuba, London, Iceland and Korea again--to find who put in the fix. Some testy banter with John Cleese as gadgets-master Q in a neat deserted-Tube-stop set is amusing, and a stop in Cuba leads to... let’s forget the plot and just say that Halle Berry can’t keep her clothes on. There’s a scene where she’s evading some squad of goons burdened with those made-in-Hollywood machineguns that couldn’t hit the side of a barn. She runs barefoot up the stone steps of a pier, and wouldn’t you know, that rose-red little sundress keeps riding up to her ass cheeks? Testing the limits of the PG-13 rating as well as the blood pressure of Maxim readers worldwide, she’s the film’s best special effect. (Insert your own single entendres.)

Berry’s entrance, out of the surf in a small hot-orange bikini, purposely mocks a legendary Bond scene that itself may once have mocked Boticelli's famous painting, "The Birth of Venus," but now only makes a curve-happy allusion to the first view in Dr. No of Ursula Undress. (Um, “Andress”.) Her compact form, up against statuesque baddies, should be an opportunity for creative mayhem, but you can’t help but wish that a more daring fight-scene director were on hand to give her things to do. Other than a testosterone-fest of a fencing match between Bond and vaguely Richard Branson-like baddie Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), most of the film’s action stays on the yawnsome level of computer-generated mediocrity, or about as plausible as Madonna’s gauze-filtered cameo as a fencing instructor. There’s more plot, more actors. I stayed awake waiting for the cars to go vroom-vroom.

New Zealand-born director Lee Tamahori's 1994 feature debut, Once Were Warriors was a notably intense drama of family dysfunction, but his American career is distinguished mostly for its mediocrity. While I haven’t seen the sopranos episode he directed, Mulholland Falls, The Edge and Along Came A Spider are increasingly ponderous and anonymous work. While Tamahori does more with composition and camera movement than the likes of Michael Apted (The World is Not Enough), this is still a Bond film, where brand names and one-liners are the highest form of honor and humor. There’s one irritating tic here, where all-too-many scenes are jump-framed in the style of coming-attractions trailers, leaping forward with already dated herky-jerky affectation.

Cool cars, though. And supposedly the producers are going to develop a film series for Berry. And stuff gets blowed up. How blowed up? Blowed up real good.

There’s a great poem by Bertolt Brecht called “Hollywood”: “Every day, to earn my daily bread/ I go to the market where lies are bought/ With great hope/ I take up my place among the sellers.” . In its many years out of release, Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 Contempt (Le Mepris), had a modest reputation as a scrapbook of musings, lovingly photographed, about movies and philosophy, shot under the guise of an international co-production. A common opinion was that Godard had taken the money and run, that is, from that era's Hercules-movie schlock titans Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine, while filling the screen with quotations from Homer and Holderin and the sardonic Brecht poem above. But seen in a restored version, first on the big screen and now on Criterion DVD--financed in part by Martin Scorsese and French designer agnes b.-- Contempt is another movie altogether, a revelation, an overlooked, shockingly accessible masterpiece amid Godard's sometimes difficult canon.

Michel Piccoli plays Paul Javal, a playwright who needs money, and producer Prokosch is embodied by Jack Palance, that heavy among heavies, waving a packet of cash in Paul's direction to doctor a script of the Odyssey that is being directed by Fritz Lang. "I like gods," Palance purrs, "I like them very much."

From more than a decade's distance, Palance's grand comedic turn had led me to file Contempt away in my memory with all the other art-movies-about-moviemaking, from Wenders' melancholy The State of Things to Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore to Olivier Assayas’ playful Irma Vep.  While Contempt plays out over a long Italian weekend, climaxing at Malaparte, a famous architectural marvel of a villa at Capri, it is also a romantic epic, the abiding, naked pain of its characters washing away all the Brechtian devices, the intellectualizing interludes. Lang is interested in historical accuracy; Palance wants more naked mermaids. "Why do you think I need the money?" Piccoli asks. "I've heard you have a beautiful young wife," Palance says.

The beautiful young wife is Camille, played with momentous petulance by Brigitte Bardot. While Godard was making a portrait of his estranged wife at the time, actress Anna Karina, that biographical nugget pales beside what's on screen. Paul asks whether he should write the script. Camille tells him it's fine. Later she feels he hasn't shown enough concern when Prokosch has been forward with her. No matter what Paul does, it will not be enough. Camille seizes on excuses, any excuses, to dismiss Paul's adoration. She remembers the love she once thought they had: "Everything used to happen instinctively, in complicitous ecstasy."

In his screenplay for Contempt, Godard wrote, "In contrast to Paul, her husband, who always acts on the strength of a complicated series of rationalizations, Camille acts nonpsychologically... Though one might wonder about her, as Paul does, she never wonders about herself. She lives full and simple sentiments, and cannot imagine being able to analyze them." And in an interview he elaborated, "Perhaps it is better not to understand too much."

For a good third of the movie, the couple bicker, contradict, cut at each other in their brightly colored, unfinished apartment. The world is reduced to Paul and Camille. Man and Woman. The furniture is as bold, as blunt as sculpture. A cerulean chair, a sunflower-colored throw, a red couch. Statues. Bardot. The camera lavishes itself from the start on the often-nude Bardot, satisfying the commercial dictates of Ponti and Levine as well as presenting the preeminent sex symbol of the age as an intractably solid, unapproachable presence. Her body rebukes the viewer, Paul. "Do you love my breasts, my eyes, my knees?" she asks, as the camera, transfixed, goes beyond objectification into blunt fetish. "I love you totally, terribly, tragically," is all Paul, smitten, ever-equivocating, can tell her.

The sensual frissons are continuous. Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard work with open eyes, and with the psychic blood spilled between this pair, it's no wonder Scorsese admires the film. Georges Delerue's mournful theme, repeated, repeated, repeated, underscores the depth of emotion and the immense distance between them, leading to their inability to communicate. (Scorsese bought the music to underscore scenes with Sharon Stone in Casino.) At the end, the camera looks out onto the ocean, the horizon. Limitless possibility or infinite distance? The space between you and I, the space between a man, a woman. The sparkling azure of the sea is the crashing gulf between them. It is unfathomably huge.

What if you do not know who you are, do not know who you want to represent yourself as to those whom you love? Then you are lost. Contempt is the most tragic, piercing, hopeless of modern love stories. Youth, beauty, cinema--they will damage you.

In Godard's later, fragmented films that no one goes to see, the old master has become one of the great sensualists of all cinema, his shots of landscapes, flowers, flesh, composed with ineffable elegance. The intellectual can still measure the wind in the trees. It is all here in Contempt, and in a form that must break your heart.