Weekend

Week-end (1967) directed by Jean-Luc Godard

After 1960 with ‘À Bout de Souffle’ or Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard became one of the leading figures of the French New Wave. Weekend (1967) is scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works and it most popular act in new wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard's career. “Weekend” (1967), which is the last presented french new wave film that directed by him after the New Yoker Video collapse. Godard declared himself a committed Marxist-Leninist theory and abandoned conventional avenues of capital investment for his films and ‘Weekend’ itself captures precisely the spirit of revolution. (movie-gazette, n.d)

The storyline is basically about a pleasant weekend trip to the countryside turns into never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations. There are two main actors, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corrine (Mireille Darc), both of them is a bourgeois couple and travel all the way to French countryside while the civilization crashes and burns around them. The purpose of Roland and Corrine went to French is to visit Corrine’s parent for a weekend. When they arrived, they find out that Corrine’s father has died and her mother refusing them to get any inheritance. Both of them killed Corrine’s mother and set off on the road again. Along the way, they become embroiled in the increasing social unrest being enacted on the roadside. Their car becomes stalled in a massive traffic jam and they are forced to continue on foot. On their journey, they encounter everything from armed revolutionaries to historical characters and a man claiming to be God.

Final thoughts, Godard's vision of Hell and it ranks with the greatest. We’re hardly aware of the magnitude of the writer/director’s conception until after we’re caught up in the comedy of horror, which keeps going further and further and becoming more nearly inescapable. (Pauline Kael, n.d)







Reference:


Jean-Luc Godard (Director) .December 27, 1967. Week-end (Weekend). France. Athos Film.

movie-gazette. (n.d). Retrieved April 1, 2013, from http://movie-gazette.com: http://movie-gazette.com/1193/week-end

Pauline Kael, T. N. (n.d). 366 weird movie. Retrieved April 3, 2013, from http://366weirdmovies.com: http://366weirdmovies.com/130-weekend-1967/