Week End - Una donna e un uomo da sabato a domenica

Week End (1967)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A husband (Jean Yanne) and wife (Mireille Darc), both having affairs and wanting the other dead, take a weekend trip to her dying father's house so that they can make sure they are in his will. Along the way they get in major traffic jams, get kidnapped by Jesus, run into various weirdos including a cannibal group and other strangeness. As with Godard's A Woman is a Woman, this film starts off great but quickly hits a wall and really left me cold for the final half hour or so. While I was watching the second half of the film I began to get bored very quickly and I started thinking why this was the case with the director. I'm not sure I came up with any positive answers but Godard kind of reminds me of sitting in the dark and having someone come up from behind you and scaring you. It's a great joke but he keeps on doing it to the point where it becomes tiresome and annoying. That's the feeling I got from watching this film because I loved and respected so much of it but after a while it just started to annoy me. The sequence where everything went wrong was the concert footage, which I thought just killed the mood and feel dead in its tracks. This was followed by an overly dramatic talk about blacks in America, which was then followed by a painfully long sequence dealing with the cannibals or whatever you want to call them. By the time the film ending I was rather frustrated but I guess this is just Godard being Godard. What I did enjoy about the film was the surreal and strange nature that everything is set up. There's a brilliantly done tracking shot, which goes on and on but never gets boring and in reality the sequence is quite beautiful. Godard, trying to be annoying on purpose, has everyone honking their horns for the entire scene and it really did come off funny as did all of the strange positions that the cars were in. Another great sequence happens early on when the wife talks about being seduced by another woman and her husband. This is a pretty erotic scene that's able to do more with dialogue than a lot of films do with actually showing the sexual acts. I like the way Godard demands that the viewer put themselves into the various situations but I think he, once again, goes overboard in his thoughts and ideas of the world.

Jean-Luc Godard's cruelly ironic portrayal of the apocalypse of Western civilization through automobile accidents and petty greed effectively marked the breaking point in his career; after this, he retreated into an overtly political militant cinema for most of the late sixties/early seventies, following some of the leads here first introduced. Whatever plot there is is slowly deconstructed and disassembled throughout the film's length, as a weekend drive by cynical bourgeois couple Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne turns into a surrealist, comic nightmare of roadkill, class struggle, murder and politics as they have to face the progressively more chaotic consequences of their blind ambition and desire for power. Strikingly photographed in long one-take tracking shots, the most celebrated of which showing an apparently endless traffic jam, the film seems to defend the revolt of the proletariat until, by the end, the bourgeois wife is down with the revolutionary Liberation Front of the Seine and Oise, in a cruelly ironic plot twist that literally underlines the cannibal side of politics. With hindsight, many say that "Week End", released in 1967, effectively announced the May '68 urban uprisings in Paris and marked the beginning of Godard's politically active phase; personally, I think that Godard sensed the winds of change and jumped on the political bandwagon as a means to find the drive for his cinema to grow. And the cool, cruel detachment he bestows on the politics on display is enough to prove that his irony has seldom been more incisive than when he's being revolutionary.

There are enough interesting devices employed in Week-end to make one regret its fatal flaws. The ten minute long tracking shot of the traffic jam near the film's beginning, which has elicited so much press, is indeed riveting. There are other moments of brilliance, such as the long circular pan at the piano recital. But the problems with Week-end eventually overpower these moments and one is left wondering why the film and its creator have such a reputation for greatness. Ultimately, Godard's quite valid points about the complacency of the bourgeoisie, the brutality of human nature and the false promises of philosophy, religion and art are undermined by his heavy-handedness. Did Godard really believe that it was necessary to give us scene after scene of people acting in the same craven way to make us understand? Did we really need the 15 minute-long revolutionary speech by the garbage collectors to be able to see his point? Even the implied cannibalism in the final scene is rendered impotent, as just a few minutes earlier, we are forced to watch the very real (and sickening) killing and butchery of a pig. This film, edited mercilessly, would have made a fascinating 45-minute short, and would've produced much more impact upon the viewer. Instead, we are left with this rambling, repetitious exercise in excess. If you intend to see Week-end, I recommend keeping a finger poised over your fast-forward button.

Yeah, it's super bizarre and it's probably Godard's strangest work (which is saying a lot) that I've seen, but I still couldn't look past the glaring flaws and just love the wonderfully surrealist images. The first hour or so of the film is pretty much perfect, combining a brutally random sense of violence with some delightfully weird fantasy images and a dark, dark sense of humour. The infamous ten minute long tracking shot of the traffic jam manages to remain entertaining throughout by linking a series of hilariously comic moments. I also especially liked the bit with the guy with the Porsche singing into a pay phone and the inexplicable appearance of Emily Brontë, who is dismissed as a fictional character and lit on fire. However, once Godard's political beliefs begin making their presence felt in an all too explicit and blatant manner, the film grinds to a halt. I was simply bored during the long monologues on America's foreign policy, which seemed a rather childish attempt by Godard to get his message across. The film never really recovers from this, as even the appearance of a group of cannibalistic revolutionaries can't bring back the same sense of black comedy that populated the first 2/3 of the film. Still, it's utterly brilliant for a majority of the time, and its bizarre images mask a mostly subtle and intelligent tirade against society and commercialism. Not for the faint-hearted, though.

'Week End' is a poor attempt to mix highbrow political attacks with a lowbrow sensibility from one of cinema's great artists. Here we have Jean-Luc Godard at both his most political, and his most experimental, throwing together ideas about Marxism, cannibalism and consumerism, and not caring one little bit whether or not the audience understands his angle of attack, or even his reason for it. Beginning the film with juvenile captions like "a film adrift in the cosmos" and "a film found on a dump", 'Week End' desperately tries to set up a nonchalant attitude to politics, society and the role of the filmmaker, but instead, simply smacks of pretension.

Godard's early movies demonstrated both a love and understanding for the medium for which he both embraced and reinvented, at the same time producing a number of classic films. However, sometime during the mid-sixties Godard became less interested in linear storytelling, and more concerned with empty provocation, which is illustrated clearly in 'Week End'. The disjointed, often rambling 'plot' follows a young Parisian couple, Roland and Corrine. Both at the height of the swinging-sixties revolution -- they openly have affairs, and delight in telling each other about their seedy escapades in sordid detail. When sex isn't motivating them, money is, or at least the prospect of money. So much so, when the chance arrives to visit Corrine's dying father, they plot to finish the old man off, and then reap the benefits of the inheritance. An odious act you might say, but up until this point the film has been quite interesting, almost enjoyable, showing us a very witty deconstruction of our preconceptions of the modern Parisian couple. But as the pair hit the road, Godard takes his message and proceeds to whack the viewer square in the face with it.

Beginning with the in/famous ten-minute tracking shot (following Roland and Corrine as the try desperately to negotiate a traffic jam on a county road), their journey takes them on an episodic odyssey that is supposed to represent a symbolic cleansing for the characters. As the film progresses they witness bizarre fairytale people who preach liberalistic nonsense, all manner of unexplained car crashes, raving lunatics and a band of terrorists. All this is supposed to strip away Roland and Corrine's bourgeois façade, making them pure human beings again. The message is blunt, unsubtle and heavy-handed, without the mindless consumerism of modern society, man and woman can function purely, as they where meant to. But despite Godard's self-confidence, it is unclear from the film where his own political allegiance lies. It would seem he feels strongly in favour of anti-commercialism/anti-consumerism, but his argument is fatuous -- and lacking sufficient and believable ammunition to back it up -- his only alternative to everyday modern life would seem to be joining a band of cannibalistic terrorists. Or maybe this was a metaphor for society's often-violent ways.

On a plus side, 'Week End' sees Godard at his most primitive, both stylistically and visually. He composes each frame with the brightest of colours, has his actors speaking monologues directly to camera, and then the aforementioned, long, unbroken tracking shots. Of course despite having an interesting quality, these stylistic flairs mean absolutely nothing. It's merely Godard's attempt to make the audience pay attention to what the characters are saying -- but since they are all speaking pure drivel it would seem to have been a bad move. By the time the film reaches its inevitable, ambiguous climax, the whole event becomes all the more tiresome. As Godard runs out of things to say (which is long after the film ceased to make sense of its ideas), he begins building up images of collective degradation and supposed black-comedy satire, neither of which work successfully... and I haven't even mentioned the acting yet.

The only decent performance you'll find that is even remotely worth watching (i.e. not entirely detestable a characterisation), is Jean-Pierre Léaud's double cameo as 'saint-just'/'singing man in phone box'. He is an extremely likable actor, familiar to audiences as the young Truffaut-alike in 'The 400 Blows'. Unlike the other cast members (with the exception of Mireille Darc as Corrine), he is clearly in sync with Godard's particular filmmaking style, and for a brief moment, makes the film almost enjoyable. I feel bad criticising Godard like this, he is a rare filmmaker, and one who has never been afraid to speak his ideas courageously -- demonstrated by the list of relevant issues here -- but they are just not communicated well enough. It's a great shame then that Godard had to make his film so heavy-handed in its ideals, and so excruciatingly slow in pace that it fails to work on any real, important level. A huge disappointment 2/5