Weekend (1967)

From https://www.filmonpaper.com/site/media/2017/08/Weekend
_1967_onesheet_2011ReRelease_USA_SteveChow-6.jpg

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Mireille Darc as Corinne; Jean Yanne as Roland; Paul Gégauff as the Pianist; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Saint-Just; Blandine Jeanson as Emily Brontë; Yves Afonso as Tom Thumb; Juliet Berto as the Radical

Synopsis: Both of them have separate lovers and are planning to bump the other off, but married couple Corinne (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne) nonetheless have greater concerns as they need to make sure Corinne's dying father leaves his fortune entirely to them even if it's by force. The journey to and from her parents' home however over one weekend in the French countryside is significantly more complex. Outside on the long, sprawling roads the world is entirely stranger. Endless, unexplained car crashes on the side of roads. Characters from history and literature wandering through the woodland and fields, sometimes played by notable actors of French cinema. And a cannibalistic, extreme left wing terrorist group in the forests who pick on tourists and bourgeoisie.

My relationship with the film "found in a dump" as it proclaims itself has been a hate-love relationship. First seen in university when one has access to the library's extensive DVD collection and a sudden interest in diving into everything within it book or disc in general, I hated Weekend on my first viewing with a passion. A violent, blackened passion. Pretentious and disjointed to my younger eyes. And yet I had an obsession with what critics found in the film and rewatched it over and over again despite still hating it. Over five or six times I saw the film, the same old Artificial Eye DVD I probably borrowed more than anyone else, until a mutual acceptance of its virtues was reached. On this viewing, I understand why I eventually admired it.

It's a poisonous film in mood. From his debut Breathless (1960) to Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard was a trendy, popular filmmaker amongst the French New Wave group. Even amongst them, a whos-who of legendary filmmakers who are still held aloft now, his work in its unconventional and openly introspective was idiosyncratic but also what led to the most parodies of what French art cinema  in reflection of. Loose stories filtered through political and cultural monologues, the manipulation of the structure of filmmaking, everything onscreen and in its creation visual and audio to be manipulated by him. Yet the films he made between 1960 and 1967 were still in an area of popular culture, making a lot of films just between those years, just for the fact he had named actors and still kept the material for the most part in stories of some sort. By Weekend however, you get a pissed off spiteful Godard who'd give up on cinema in the populist sense and start an even more prolific increase of productions, entirely in political documents and video experiments in the seventies until his first "proper" theatrical feature with named actors and fuller plots came in 1980.

It's only a year before the May 1968 riots that shook France, so it can be argued Weekend is a prophecy of a breaking point and an apt time for Godard to dive headfirst afterwards into "difficult" essay work after. Here he decides to mix satire and Alice in Wonderland with a tale of two utterly loathsome figures, stereotypes of the worst of upper middle class French bourgeoisie. Dumped into a surreal netherworld of the French countryside, we see all the political concerns played out in absurd scenarios, already warning of the chaos about to be witnessed before the couple get out of their driveway, an argument with another family that involved intentionally hitting a car bumper with your vehicle and tennis balls used as ammunition. Slapstick but the humour's a little too dark.

It's still twisted to this day. Moments of Weekend feel even more transgressive now despite Darc and Yanne playing central characters you'd never defend. Roland willingly lets a hobo rape Corinne in a roadside ditch off-screen, for the most extreme example of this, only to intercut this between failed attempts by Roland to hitchhike undercut by wrong answers to political questions by the people in the vehicles, humour that could make the scene utterly tasteless if the film wasn't already a film of the bleakest kind. One with few redeemable figures and willing to break taboos beforehand. There's a warning of what to expect, parodying a sexually explicit monologue from Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), set to ridiculously bombastic music, as Corinne describes a profusely pornographic descriptions of sexual acts with the blankest line readings possible, including an  egg being used George Bataille style. The film from then on goes to include the likes of a whole family being massacred, cannibalism, to even real death of animals by the techniques used by real slaughterhouse workers, only done in the middle in the woods rather than in their work environment, material that can be debated whether its defendable for artistic purposes or not but still shocks the viewer. If the film's still disturbing it's that Godard at his angriest has managed to made such a vicious film still to this day, and that inexplicably it's also capable of being one of his funniest too like two perverse sides of the same coin, both existing and jarring intercutting into each other for sharp, discomforting effect.

From http://altscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/
2011/10/Editors-Pick-Weekend-Godard.jpg

It's important to realise that, proclaiming this to be his last "real" film, Godard would indeed leave theatrical cinema for his diegetic era. Baring Tout Va Bien (1972) with Jane Fonda, which does have a narrative, he'd form the Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Pierre Gorin to make very left wing essay work over eight long/feature length films, then proceed to make various feature length, short and television projects which were extensions of his thoughts. Godard's films were already experiment and clashed with their need for a narrative structure since his earliest work, but Weekend feels like the literal car crash between both sides where things will change. Aspects of this do succeed perfectly. Some work for the humour too. Some work for the absolutely nastiness in its veins. There's also one moment which still is an issue for the film - a prolonged political monologue by two garbage men (one African, one Arab) which is of its time, one I still drifted listlessly through switched off completely as I did on that first viewing back in university. The sequence will be a major issue for any viewer of the film, but this is a rare case where a scene that would destroy other films cannot undermine everything good before and after it. It's merely now part of the demonically charged tone of a film purposely trying to attack the viewer constantly even if it's by boredom. Hell, it could've actually been intentional knowing the rest of the film, learning of a contemporary review where that was the scene recommended for viewers to leave in the cinema to go get a coffee before heading back.

The good in the film is the madness that takes place, Godard using his habit of even manipulating the film's title sequences to embrace the absurd and sickly humorous. Whilst Weekend is a vicious film in tone, it nonetheless has snippets of pure silly humour too, intercut within the same scenes to add to its darkness but also show Godard can be whimsical, the last thing people normally associate with him on the surface. Where suddenly Emily Bronte and Tom Thumb appear and, even if tragically Bronte is set on fire and burns to nothing, she still gets to ask nonsensical questions the lead characters aren't appreciative of. Where Jean-Pierre Léaud both gets to play a historical figure in Napoleonic era military costume and also a man who sings his phone calls with considerable skill and talent in a phone box being pestered by the leads. And there's plenty of the more darker moments of humour which are as surreal. The number of car accidents seen almost become post-apocalyptic in their reoccurring images, and then there's the legendary tracking shot over a traffic jam that begins the series of bizarre incidents for the anti-heroes, arguably the best moment in the entirety of Godard's cinema. Technically complex, done in a perfect one shot over a long space of time and full of sight gags - cars the wrong way around, an elderly couple playing chess in the middle of the road - before ending with the first of many gristly road accidents encountered.

It helps Godard's technical awareness of the structure of cinema, and the kind of skilled production crews he used at this time, were always of incredible quality. By this point with Weekend, his earliest style drastically switched from the raw, on-the-fly virtues of Breathless to full colour, heavily orchestrated films that are luscious as he uses their look and style to dictate his political concerns. A primary coloured, bold aesthetic washed over his last films of this era which used striking compositions to catch the viewer's eyes and make them think about what was onscreen. The use of sound and wordplay, which would continue onwards whether on film or video in his career, is playful and purposely keeps the viewer on their toes. And brilliantly he does use his deconstructive style for humour, the film reel literally coming of just before the leads end up totalling their car in reckless driving.

As a result Weekend is actually a good film to get into Godard's more difficult work in spite of its more nasty, poisoned streak. This is ironic considering how much I once hated this film, but alongside some of the cruellest moments of Godard's filmmaking, material which will make viewers uncomfortable and should be approached with caution, you yet also get some of the openly funniest and inventive which leads to a paradoxical situation that it's still the better way to get into his deeper filmography in spite of its more darker moments. It's a film as much a document of its time and something beyond. Of its time as the sixties would die miserably and, predated by the cannibalistic left wing terrorists, revolutionary factions would get far more extreme and even un-defendable in morals in the late sixties and seventies (the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Red Army in Japan etc.). It feels beyond its time as, whilst the world no longer looks like this film, sadly its twisted jokes still resonate. An encounter between the rich and the poor - when a farmer crashes his tractor into a trendy sports car and kills a man, leading his girlfriend (an early Juliet Berto role) to get into a screaming match with him - ends with both sides siding together in an anti Semitic comment at the fleeing central characters. Much of the humour in this Bourgeois in Wonderland scenario sadly has not been lost in the modern day but it means the humour's still scathing and keeps the film alive.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Grotesque/Surreal/Transgressive

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Personal Opinion:

A hard film, one I have had a complex relationship with for over ten years with. I've despised Weekend and now I admire it. Appropriate for a film that can leave some viewers feeling like they need a shower afterwards from. 

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjBiMmNlOGEtN2JhNC00YzVjLTlh
Y2UtMGIwYjk1NTYzMmVhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg