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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
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Weekend (1967)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Part anti-bourgeois fire bomb, part leftist political propaganda, part Surrealist farce, there is quiet simply no other film on this planet remotely like Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. Godard’s films in the mid-'60s – particularly Two or Three Things I Know About Her – were quickly moving away from conventional narratives in favor of a style of cinematic essay. Weekend is the ultimate expression of that style. Done in a post-modern, cut-and paste style (Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers owes an enormous debt to Weekend), the film depicts a bourgeois couple’s trip down a rabbit hole to an apocalyptic hell of endless automobile wrecks that Godard sees as the ultimate outcome of a consumerist society. A violent, bleak, and hilariously funny film, Weekend recalls a time when the very boundaries of what cinema could be were being stretched thin by Godard. |
 Weekend Starring: Jean-Pierre Leaud Directed by:Jean-Luc Godard VHS Tape - $25.95 Not Rated Subtitles in English |
Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mirielle Darc) are an obnoxious Parisian yuppie couple bored with each other (both have lovers, and Corinne gives a lengthy erotic monologue to her lover while seated on a table wearing only her bra and panties) and waiting for Corinne’s rich father to die so they can collect an inheritance. Each confesses plans to their respective lovers to kill the other as soon as the money is in. They plot to drive to Corinne’s parents where they will expedite her father’s demise. But the road rage they see outside their apartment window is just a hint of the carnage and sheer bizarreness that awaits them out on the road.
Almost immediately, the couple run into a surreal traffic jam, a nearly 10-minute tracking shot of a country road clogged with Renaults, Citroens, Facels, and bloody corpses (a scene that will test the bizarro acceptance factor in some viewers). They see the class struggle between the haves and have-nots played out when a tractor kills a young woman’s sports car-driving fiancé ("He had the right" she says, "over the poor ones, the fat ones..."). They encounter French Revolutionary hero Camille Saint Just (New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud) and Emily Brontë (who they set on fire), assist a musician who plays Mozart sonatas on a grand piano in the middle of a farm, get lectured on revolutionary third world politics by Marxist garbage men, and are finally coerced to join a group of cannibal hippie radicals living in the woods (whose leader plays the drums in a field reciting passages from Lautreamont’s Maldoror).
Of course, this is just a quick description, as it’s nearly impossible to describe accurately and succinctly all that happens in the film. While at times it seems Godard is straying off his anti-bourgeois tract in favor of just spouting off about anything that comes in to his head, the sheer creativity of his filmmaking, and the fact he does get back on target, excuses this excess. The film teems with allusions, not just to other films (Luis Bunuel gets a little tribute here), but to literature and music, resulting in a film that plays like the cinematic equivalent of hypertext (he said hoping readers notice this issue’s theme worked in at last). In fact, the film is interrupted throughout by titles ("A Film Adrift in the Cosmos", "A film Found on a Garbage Heap"), animated text, and bits and pieces of musical cues that often obscure dialogue, giving the film a feeling of a multi-media experiment disguised as cinema.
It’s a superb-looking film with perfect color photography by the great Raoul Coutard, and it’s worth seeing if only to observe how Godard fuses the dialectics of culture – both high and low, high art and pop culture – into a cinematic style that still influences filmmakers. Like D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles, Godard changed the face of cinema, and Weekend is one of his essential works.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.