WEEKEND Movie Review

A tense Parisian couple (Mirielle Darc and Jean Yanne) hit the highway to take a weekend motor trip to visit the wife's mother. Along the way they encounter not only a surrealistic traffic jam, but also the stylized and bitterly satirical carnage that comes with it (a woman staggers from the twisted, bloody, flaming wreckage of her car, screaming “My Hermes pocketbook!”). Soon this bourgeois couple will find themselves at the center of a society in the process of self-destruction; on their trip to mom's they will encounter murder, rape, wholesale greed, and cannibalism, all seen as a natural part of a capitalist society eating its own entrails, with no choice left but revolution. Godard's visionary 1967 treatise/position paper/spectacle implies that this is the last chapter in a bourgeois cinema, as well. With his radically inventive editing techniques and jarring, ingenious juxtaposition of different styles and story elements, Weekend suggests that we must find new ways to tell the same old stories, or we will be condemned to repeat them. Godard shakes up the form of motion pictures as thoroughly as their content, and the result is a funny, brilliant, appalling snapshot of a decade that was about to blow itself apart.

NEXT STOP … Pierrot le Fou, Every Man for Himself, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

1967 105m/C FR IT Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valerie Lagrange, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Yves Beneyton; D: Jean-Luc Godard; W: Jean-Luc Godard; M: Antoine Duhamel. VHS NYF, FCT