1967’s Weekend (or perhaps “Week End”) is Jean-Luc Godard throwing up his hands in frustration. The cacophony of cars honking horns outside his window have made it clear: all is lost, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better. I knew that was going to be the vibe going in, but I was hoping there’d be something more here – some insight into how things got so bad or a vision for how we all get through it – since these days I’m kind of feeling the same way. But actually what I came away from it with was a sense that I’m still pretty far from being a Marxist French misanthrope.
It’s overly generous to suggest that Weekend has a story to tell, but it is to some extent a road trip movie about a detestable bourgeois couple. We meet them as the husband, Roland (Jean Yanne), watches out the window as a fender bender escalates into a brutal altercation between the two drivers. He sits back in the apartment, fully dressed and assuming the position of a therapist, as his wife, Corinne (Mireille Darc), in her underwear, describes a ménage à trois she had with her friends Monique and Paul. The score ramps up to drown out the naughtiest bits but that’s not a problem for us subtitle readers, so I can tell you the lovemaking escalated to nakedly sitting in a cat’s milk bowl and cracking eggs with Corinne’s butt. After hearing all this, Roland asks if this is all true or just a nightmare Corrine had, and she responds, “I don’t know.” Welcome to Weekend!
The couple decide to drive to Oinville to collect on Corrine’s inheritance – they’ve implicitly been poisoning her father and are sure he must have died by now. This sets off a series of automobile-related scenes, most of which featuring horrifically-staged tableaus of carnage with cars flipped and mangled, bodies all over the road, and blood everywhere. But Corrine and Roland don’t really care, at least as long as it doesn’t slow them down. In the movie’s most famous sequence, they drive through an epic traffic jam in an eight-minute long tracking shot. Everyone is backed up – families, horse-drawn carriages, circus animals, a sailboat – in one lane while the couple cheat their way through in the empty second lane. Eventually they get to the gruesome scene of the accident and drive through a pool of blood, staining their tires and leaving a nasty streak behind them as they continue down a country road. And THEN things get weird.
The rest of Weekend – so like, the actual majority of the film – is a series of disorienting, surreal encounters. Corrine and Roland meet characters from fiction, historical figures, magical carjackers, even the crew of the film taking a break. And they get increasingly desperate and violent too – if the first half of the movie doesn’t put you off, Godard rewards you with some truly upsetting imagery towards the end. I’m talking about a flayed rabbit getting doused in blood, I’m talking about a rape scene that calls back to Corrine’s threesome story, I’m talking about a real pig and goose being slaughtered, I’m talking about people happily eating human meat stew. In the end, Godard, ever the fan of title cards, shows two different messages: “Fin de Conte” (End of Story) and “Fin de Cinéma” (End of Cinema).
And so it was for Godard, who at this point abandoned his new wave roots and would spend the next decade plus making lower budget political films. How very “Dylan goes electric” of him. Look, it’s always going to be the case that when you start doing the thing George Lucas has always threatened to do but is actually to lazy to do, abandon the mainstream and start making extremely personal art, you’re going to alienate people. The last half of this movie lost me. But the flip side is, for the few people you do reach, you’re going to resonate deep down right to their cores. I’m not French and I’m not living in 1967, I don’t get why he wanted to tell this story in this way, but I do appreciate why he needed to tell it. I may have slightly different politics from him, I certainly have sensibilities from him, but I definitely understand what he was feeling. And we can all agree on one thing: it sucks how much our world has been built around cars.