Week End (1967)

Also known as "Weekend, Week-End, Le Week-end,
Week-end, un uomo e una donna dal sabato alla domenica"
Overall Score: 7 out of 10

Starring: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valérie Lagrange, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Yves Beneyton, Paul Gégauff, Daniel Pommereulle, Virginie Vignon, Yves Afonso, Blandine Jeanson, Ernest Monzer

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Running Time: 100 minutes

US MPAA rating: N/A
UK BBFC rating: 18
Comedy, Drama, Horror

On DVD

On DVD

After his extraordinary debut in 1960 with 'À Bout de Souffle' (or 'Breathless'), Jean-Luc Godard became one of the leading figures of the French New Wave movement, reinventing the rules of cinema not only from one film to the next, but sometimes even from scene to scene within a single film. 'Weekend', his picaresque satire of a greed-fuelled society speeding out of control, came at a moment of transition both for the director and for France itself - for after its release in 1967, Godard declared himself a committed Marxist-Leninist and abandoned conventional avenues of capital investment for his films - and 'Weekend' itself captures precisely the spirit of revolution in the air that would lead, one year later, to the student uprisings in Paris.

Corinne (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne), a bourgeois Parisian couple, have plotted together to manipulate and murder their way into a family inheritance (with each also planning secretly to eradicate the other once the money is secured). So one Saturday morning the venal pair set off on a drive to pick up Corinne's wealthy father from the clinic where he is dying - but the backroads and byways of the French countryside prove to be a strange parallel universe where monied elites and working classes, vacationers and vagabonds, politics and religion, the ancient and the modern, first and third worlds, revolutionaries and the establishment, all collide head-on in a bloody pile-up that marks the end of civilisation itself, as well as the "end of cinema".

Godard is at pains to outrage and unsettle his viewers with all manner of taboos, including torture, parricide, corpse-robbing, rape, bestiality, and finally cannibalism - because, as one character puts it, "the horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror". Yet at the same time Godard always keeps the viewer at a cool distance through a series of inventive devices that disrupt all suspension of disbelief. Events are regularly punctuated by oblique, punning titles (a trick borrowed from the surrealist Luis Buñuel's

DVD Extras: Enhanced for widescreen TVs; Dolby digital 2.0, French language with optional English subtitles; interview with cinematographer Raoul Coutard (19min) on how Godard "was in a bad mood for most of the film", and went out of his way on the set to annoy his producers or humiliate Mireille Darc (who had not been Godard's own choice for the lead rôle); Mike Figgis on 'Weekend' (23min), on the richness of Godard's ideas ("each scene is like a new film"), on his detachment, his use of music and text, and his influence on later filmmakers; bios of Godard, Coutard, Figgis and Colin MacCabe (Coutard's interviewer).
Version reviewed: Weekend (1967) from Artificial Eye
Extras: 4 out of 10

It's Got: A thoroughly unlikable pair of main characters; an extraordinary ten-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam that reveals all of society heading blindly for the apocalypse; a succession of bizarre picaresque encounters; a strange and gripping soundtrack.

It Needs: Let's just say that the main characters look bored with good reason during some of the film's longer political diatribes.

Alternatives: L'Âge D'Or, 'Exterminating Angel', 'Crash', 'Wild at Heart', 'La Grande Bouffe', 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover', Gozu

Summary: A funny, shocking, and at times infuriating crash-and-burn trip through the clashing ideologies of the sixties. Overall Score: 7 out of 10