1967: Weekend

Weekend (Godard, 1967) 8/10


- Didn’t you hear what he said? Marx says we’re all brothers! (Corinne)
- Marx didn’t say that. Some other communist said that. Jesus said that (Roland)

What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people (Roland)

On a warm summer Friday, bourgeois couple Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) prepare for a weekend trip to visit Corinne's mother in the country. But this is no ordinary visit. For five years, they have been poisoning Corinne's father's food in an attempt to collect his life insurance. With his death in sight, the couple plan to intimidate Corinne's mother into giving them more than their alloted share.

On the road to Corinne's mother's estate in Oinville, the couple come across an extensive car crash; prompting them to careen and twist amidst the cacophony of horns through the debris of mutilated bodies, burning cars and eccentric characters playing cards, tossing beach balls and drinking wine to pass the time. Oblivious to the events around them, Roland and Corinne are slow to discern that the world around them has changed, prompting them to belatedly ponder whether they are still in reality or part of a film.

Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend is one of cinema's most incendiary and political pieces. While its overt sloganeering is dated, Weekend is still one of cinema's most adventurous and biting black comedies. Filmed at the beginning of his period of blatant anti-commercial cinema, Godard's attitude toward traditional modes of cinema can be summed up in his final credits which read: End of Film. End of Cinema.

With its radical chic, Weekend was representative of both Godard's own immersion into the avant-garde, as well as a shift in 60's (particularly Europrean) cinema towards counter-culture, anti-narrative and "conscious" cinema in films such as Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up and Federico Fellini's 8½. While in North America, this trend would only gain mainstream signficance upon the release of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, this movement was alive and kicking throughout world cinema's new wave movements.

This emphasis on consciously deconstructing cinema is prevalent in Weekend. Structurally, Godard playfully tinkers with the medium's most orthodox elements such as inserting dramatic swells of music at inappropriate moments, placing intertitles with revolutionary slogans and utilizing non-linear editing. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard uses slow tracking shots and long takes that increasingly become shot from further distances as the surroundings become less familiar to present-day reality. Additionally he uses Brechtian dramatic techniques by having his character's consciously break the "fourth wall" between performers and audience:. This is notable in scene in which revolutionally-aligned Middle Eastern and African garbage men speak to the camera about the state of the third world in Marxian socio-economic language. Several other instances are found when Roland and Corinne question the cinematic nature of "reality."

"Reality" itself in Weekend is a misnomer. As a film focusing more on cinematic and political ideas than narrative concerns, Weekend is a surrealist evocation of radical politics in the style of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. With its radical leftist sympathies, Godard's film is drenched in Marxian and Gramscian debates over class struggle, political and cultural hegemony and the crass materialism of the bourgeoisie. Yet, in a recent interview with Andrew Sarris, the pioneering director claimed that he never was a committed Marxist, but rather used the ideology's provactive nature to dissect the social and political concerns of the time. Additional viewings of Weekend slightly corrolate with this position, as Marx's philosophies still have support in a post-structuralist dominated academe.

And while Godard espouses these radical philopshies in Weekend and his later films with radical cinema collective Dziga Vertov, the film's nature as an ironic and surreal black comedy seems to undermine previous critical attempts to pidgeonhole Weekend as a distinctly Marxist film. Given Godard's predilection with the then fashionable cause of Maoism, Weekend focuses more on the agency of agrarian peasants rather than industrial workers. Yet, Godard does not frame the peasants in a favourable life. They are posited as uneducated imbeciles who heartily sing atop their tractors, but lack the intellectual or economic capacity to run society.

Contrarily, the bourgeoisie are neither assumed to be responsbile enough for contemporary society. The middle-class characters in Weekend are petty, arrogant, immoral, reckless and materialistic: flamboyantly displaying their wealth and status. After being forced at gunpoint to pick-up a hitchhiker who grants wishes, the couple's suggestions are all purely object-oriented such as weapons, an evening with James Bond and dresses. Similarly, when Roland and Corinne's reckless driving gets the better of them, resulting in a fiery crash, Corinne's only concern is the loss of her Hermes handbag.

Throughout Weekend, the film's bourgeois members are continually shown to be ignorant of the changes around them; thus heightening their disturbed response to these shifts upon their belated realization. Furthermore, they are constantly shown as bored. When listening to two garbage men discuss politics, Roland and Corinne pass each other cigarettes in order to fill their lethargic void. Furthermore, each of them openly engages in adulterous affairs; with Corinne telling her lover an erotic adulterous story of a menage a trois in order to arouse him.

The violence within human nature and modern life in also shown in Corinne and Roland's actions: running other motorists and cyclists off the road, fantasizing of murdering Corinne's mother and standing emotionless while others are raped, killed or beaten. When other characters refuse to offer them assistance, they engage in acts of theft and violence in order to pursue their selfish aims such as their attack on another middle-class man (Jean Pierre Leaud) singing to his children on a rural telephone, who refuses to drive them to Oinville in his sports car.

The abrasive and careless nature of the bourgeoisie is apparent when Roland and Corinne enter a quaint village, only for class distinctions to become heightened when a gruff farmer crashes his tractor into a young couple recklessly speeding in their Triumph convertible. Pejorative language and accusations are thrown around as the woman proclaims the working classes are "pissed off because we fuck in the Riveria and you don't...", only for the farmer to retort "If it weren't for me and my tractor, the French would have nothing to eat" But when Corinne and Roland refuse to drive neither part to Oinville for help, the two warring classes unite in what Godard's intertitle asserts is a "Phony Graph."

This aforementioned sequence is a rare instance of harmony in Weekend in which contemporary society devolves into anarchy and chaos: a post-apocalyptic world in which the products of industry are scattered and strewn in fields. From the film's opening moments, society slowly erupts into an orgy of death and destruction; that results in cannablist Maoist guerillas stalking the countryside. Thus, rather than being a purely didactic Marxist film Weekend is more or less a critique of contemporary society's dissolution into violence and savagery. Although released in December 1967, Weekend is the visual template for 1968: arguably the most radical and violent year of the post-WWII era. It is in this year of assassinations, student protests, war and repression that Weekend's apocalyptic vision holds true in its animated and extremist surreal outlook on society.

In Weekend Godard does not appear to prescribe revolution, but rather shows the aggressive flaws within modern society. Thus, when Godard includes several real and imagined figures from the Enlightenment and Romantic eras such as Emily Brönte, Tom Thumb, St. Just (Jean Pierre Leaud) and Joseph Balsamo, he appears to be satirically critiquing a society which has purged these elements inquiring into the nature of truth from its schema. When characters ponder the origins of civilization or question the nature of reality in Weekend, Godard seems to be suggesting the artificial nature of modern life and a need to restore organic elements of life. Unlike Roland's belief that life is film, Godard seems to assert that life is not cinema, but rather one which addresses and rectifies the violent tendecies of human nature; in order to avoid the type of surrealist apocalypse the film proposes.

* Weekend is avaiable on R2 DVD by Artifical Eye and on R1 DVD by New Yorker Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque