Two-timing with each other, a bourgeois French couple, Corinne (Darc) and Roland (Yanne), embarks on a road trip to visit Corinne’s dying father in the countryside, licking their lips for the share of inheritance and is not above of resorting to murder to get minted. This is the callous premise of Jean-Luc Godard’s iconoclastic WEEKEND, a larkish portent of the forthcoming May 1968 movement.
"A film found in a dump” is one of the ceaseless and rip-snorting inter-titles interlaced into this vignette-laden social critique through Godard’s trademark jump cuts, which pertinently manifests the film’s anarchic nexus, what Godard presents is a society infested with self-seeking and blinkered characters, the collapse of post-industrial capitalism is blatantly symbolized by the wrecked automobiles, strewn along the pair’s route, where human decorum is wantonly shredded, conflicts escalate into grapples and killing, their ill-fated journey is set into a tailspin attendant with surreal encounters and culminated with the fatal captivity of a cannibal brigand. The whole scenario is erratic, bizarre and starkly incendiary.
Godard certainly has a field day with his whimsically conceptualized, bewitchingly coordinated mise-en-scène, and experiments on long shots with alacrity and proficiency (the one on the road is linearly uninterrupted and another one in the farm pans through a 360-degree panorama with the diegetic Sonata No. 19 in D-major played by a pianist holding forth on Mozart’s genius), to the cinema culture, he is truly a revolutionary, a visionary and a sui generis aesthete, his works forever change film’s syntax and structure: line-delivery can be obscured by swelling score; linear narrative can be disjointed into tonally disparate segments then stitched back into the story-line on top of numerous left-field choices such as conspicuous elision, contextual irrelevance and overt agitprop ideology; and apart from his avant-garde modus operandi, what lies beneath is an elemental force of dark humor betraying his perspicuous understanding of human’s behavioral pattern and pernicious psychology (looking at the loveless co-existence between the couple, there is no bottom-line in one’s total abandon apropos of brutality).
A biting attack on capitalism and bourgeois, Godard’s WEEKEND is not as inaccessible as many purport, and it has a bemusing tongue-in-cheek aplomb which is counterintuitively droll but impeccably captures the sign of the times, you don’t sense the anger, but in the end of the day, you are chuckling with a simmering sting of foreboding.
referential points: Godard’s MASCULIN FÉMININ (1966, 6.9/10), PIERROT LE FOU (1965, 7.4/10), CONTEMPT (1963, 7.3/10), BREATHLESS (1960, 8.7/10)
