Summary
A married couple, Corinne and Roland, set out to visit their parents in the French countryside.
Corinne’s father is very old and she wants to ensure that she and her husband inherit
the bulk of his estate. Ideally, her father and mother would be killed in a road
accident. En route, Corinne and Roland are involved in a car crash and have to continue
their journey on foot. Their countryside walk soon turns into a nightmare as they
witness further road accidents and are tormented by philosophers and social crusaders.
They finally reach the home of Corinne’s parents – but too late. Her
father has died and he has left everything to his wife. Corinne and Roland have
but one option open to them. A short while later, they are captured and humiliated
by a band of neo-socialist resistance fighters.
Review
Weekend is a typically Godardish view of the way that technological progress
corrupts and ultimately destroys civilised bourgeois society. It is one of the most
important French films of the 1960s, yet it is one of the least accessible. It is
important because it evokes vividly the mood of the time, pre-empting the student uprising
of the spring of 1968, drawing on the growing social conscience and a flagrant hostility
towards bourgeois attitudes.
Unfortunately, Godard
probably goes a little too far in alienating his audience with scenes and dialogue that
vary from the truly shocking to the completely incomprehensible. The style is remarkably
similar to that of Luis Bunuel’s Le charme discrèt de la bourgeoisie,
but the end result is far less comfortable. Godard’s customary humour appears
very black and unappetising when it accompanies images of blood-drenched corpses hanging
out of mangled motor cars. One senses that if Godard had taken just one more
step towards surrealism, the result would have been more akin to Monty Python than
Nouvelle Vague. (The Python team were obviously inspired by the latter half of the
film, complete with a virtuoso pianist playing Mozart in a farmyard, an O.T.T. murder
scene, to say nothing of the surreal antics of the FLSO resistance fighters.)
If anything, the film
is over-indulgent. Godard is not content just to make a political point. It
seems that he wants to shock his audience into submission, but that approach – if
indeed that is his intention – practically fails. Far from hating the bourgeois
couple that Godard is so keen to vilify, the audience ends up partially sympathising with
them, in spite of their double standards and shallowness. The “Arizona
Jules” joke is yet another example of Godard’s subtlety going into warp drive:
just how many people would appreciate the reference?
If the film succeeds
it is because, like most of Godard’s films, it has seemingly limitless depth and
a profound moral lesson to preach, but in a contradictory and self-mocking manner.
© James Travers 1999
For more on Jean-Luc Godard see:
The life of Jean-Luc Godard
Best of the French New Wave
A bout de souffle
Vivre sa vie
Alphaville
Masculin, féminin
Le Mépris
Pierrot le fou
Eloge de l'amour
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