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Credits
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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:
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