Week End (1967)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Film Review

A film lost in the cosmos and A film found on the scrap-heap are the opening captions to what would be Jean-Luc Godard's most virulent assault on contemporary French society.  An Odyssey in anarchy would be an equally fitting epithet, for what Godard paints is a deeply disturbing picture of a world that is in the process of disintegration as the forces of capitalism and socialist revolution lock horns and tear the established order apart.  The film is best remembered for its ten minute long sequence in which the camera tracks slowly along a seemingly interminable traffic jam in a country lane, whose peace is ruined by the unending blare of irate klaxons - a chilling visual metaphor for where our society may be heading.

Week End has been compared with Luis Buñuel's Le Charme discrèt de la bourgeoisie.  Both films portray the middle classes as an enemy of society, a parasitic entity that lives off the blood and sweat of the working classes, making a great play of its moral and intellectual superiority whilst openly indulging in morally dubious and often stupidly self-destructive pastimes.   Godard's approach, however, is far more political than merely satirical.  He sees the bourgeoisie not just as an object of ridicule, but as something that is a genuine danger to society, a boil that must be lanced if mankind is to have any hope of future happiness.

Compared with Godard's previous films - Made in USA and La Chinoise - Week End has something resembling a plot, although this doesn't necessarily mean that the film is any more accessible.  In some ways this is the most Brechtian of Godard's middle-period films.  Any spectator of this film can never be a passive observer but must be actively engaged in interpreting what he or she sees, otherwise it becomes just a lifeless piece of abstract art.   Week End doesn't even pretend to be a representation of reality and repeatedly states that it is only a film (just as you might say that that the Mona Lisa is only a painting).

It was through Mireille Darc's insistence that she would make a film with Jean-Luc Godard that the director was able to secure the comparatively large budget for Week-End.  Darc was under contract with a film production company and refused to make another film until she had appeared in a film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.  By hiring two well-known and talented actors in the shape of Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, Godard knew that his film would have mainstream appeal, which he and the film's distributors were quick to capitalise on.  As a result, Week-End is the best known and most commercially successful of Godard's political films, and some regard it as one of the most important films of the 1960s.

Made in 1967, Week End would soon prove to be a highly prophetic film.  As the events of May 1968 were to show, our greed-based, winner takes all society is not as secure as we like to think and that beneath the thin veneer of civilisation lies a seething mass of discontent.  As De Gaulle found to his cost in the last year of his presidency, it takes very little to upend the apple cart and bring anarchy and uncertainty where order and stability once reigned, under the seemingly benign grip of capitalism.  Forty years on, with the failings of unrestrained capitalism exposed for all to see, Week End has an even greater resonance.

Film Synopsis

One perfectly ordinary weekend, a perfectly ordinary married couple get into their car and head off to the country for an ordinary family get-together.  Corinne Durand is keen to keep in close contact with her elderly father, knowing that it will not be long now before he dies and leaves her everything he possesses - at least that is what she and her greedy husband Roland hope.  The day starts out as uneventful as ever, with no hint of the bizarre happenings that will soon overtake the Durands as they rush towards their destiny.  It begins with a car crash.  In no time, the road ahead is blocked by scores of immobilised cars.  Of course no one shows any interest in the unfortunate wretches whose smashed bloody remains now litter the highway.  All that the trapped motorists want is to get on with their journey.  Life is too short to spend it stuck in a traffic jam.

The enterprising Durands find a way out of their impasse and are soon continuing their carefree weekend excursion, oblivious to - or at least unconcerned by - the unfolding apocalypse around them.  It doesn't even bother them when their own vehicle crashes and ends up a smouldering heap of junk.  With wrecked cars and mangled human remains strewing the roads like some kind of sick satanic confetti, Corinne and Roland proceed with their cross-country trek and run straight into the most bizarre collection of individuals imaginable.  Dustbin men, poets, philosophers, revolutionaries, fictional characters and dark-skinned foreigners - the whole spectrum of humanity at its most frightening and fantastic - appear to taunt and torment the unsuspecting bourgeois couple.

Roland seems not to care one iota when a filthy tramp throws himself onto his wife and proceeds to rape her.  When, after this hair-raising ordeal, the couple finally reach the home of Corinne's parents they find they have come too late.  Corine's rich father had just died and left everything he posses to his wife.  This naturally prompts the unjustly disinherited daughter to murder her mother.  The story does not end happily, however.  Before the Durands can enjoy their newfound wealth they are captured by a gang of cannibalistic Maoist revolutionaries, who decide to make a meal of Roland.  Corine gladly opts to join this happy band and is soon sitting down to eat her husband.