Week-end

I have a lot of problems with Godard's movies. I don't dispute that he is one of the great innovators of modern film making and 'Breathless' is certainly one of the few movies that changed cinema forever. But I don't really ENJOY watching 'Breathless' all that much , 'Bande a part' mostly bored me stupid , and 'Alphaville' is interesting for the most part but not exactly the most entertaining movie ever made... 'Week End' however is one of the few Godard movies I actually watch and LIKE and recommend. For most people it is one of his most difficult movies but I didn't find that to be the case. Anyone who enjoys surreal movies like those of Bunuel ('The Exterminating Angel' is name-dropped in 'Week End') or David Lynch or Peter Greenaway's underrated gem 'The Falls', or even vintage Monty Python will find this movie utterly fascinating. Corinne (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne) are two awful characters, almost proto-yuppies, who go on a drive to the country to weedle some money out of Corinne's parents. They immediately find themselves caught in a nightmarish traffic jam, and after that the movie get progressively weirder. Someone (I think it's Roland) says "this movie is rotten. All we meet are insane characters" (I'm paraphrasing). And that about nails it. We see Emily Bronte and fictional characters interact with Corinne and Roland, rape, murder, violence, revolution and all kinds of strangeness. The movie was released in 1967, best know as the Summer Of Love and the height of flower power, but Godard anticipates the darkness and despair of 1968 and 1969 when The Stones sang "the time is right for bloody revolution", The Stooges "1969 okay, war across the USA", The Doors "we want the world and we want it now!". 'Week End' is the anarchic side of the 1960s, not the peace'n'love'n' Woodstock 1960s. In many ways the movie is years ahead of its time anticipating (as did 'Alphaville') postmodernism. It can be difficult viewing at times, sometimes a bit frustrating if you prefer a conventional narrative, but I really really like it, and there's just nothing quite like it anywhere. If I was going to put some 1960s movies in a time capsule for future generations I would include 'Week End' alongside 'A Hard Day's Night', 'The Trip', 'Blow Up', 'Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!', 'Easy Rider', 'If...', 'Psycho', 'El Topo', 'Performance' and one or two others. Highly recommended inspired anarchic weirdness!

'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

Wow, such a polarizing film! It seems everyone either detests this work as something less than terrible or conversely praise it to the heavens. I guess I'm sadly somewhere in between. Having read a bit of theory behind the film before I saw it I won't rehash that here, only state my reaction, for if there's anything this picture cries out for it is a reaction. Well here goes. Parts are horrifying. Far more disturbing than slasher film gore (mostly because the imagery being dispensed with aren't human). Parts are boring (and NOT the ten minute tracking shot which was a gem. Has anyone even been in a traffic jam before? Godard merely replicates it and all the while makes you wonder where that couple's car is heading, and what could have caused such a jam). Parts don't make sense, mostly because I don't think they are supposed to. That is their purpose, to disrupt sense. And, surprisingly something that nobody on here has mentioned, parts are very very funny. Okay, so perhaps not everyone will laugh as often as I did, but please, lighten up kids, Godard is making fun of us, its healthy to laugh at oneself once and a while. And some of his film is just fun too. Okay, now go back to the other reviews of how hopelessly miserable you'll feel after watching this, or how much of a religious awakening this will be if your down with the art-house film-erati. Definitely worth seeing.

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.

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.