There's a rather thin line between innovation that is brilliant and innovation that is merely tiresome, boring, pretentious, and ineffective. Film fans and critics have a distinctly mixed view about which side of that line is occupied by Weekend (1967), also known as Week End or Le Week-End.

Historical Background: There's no question that Weekend is important as a turning point in the career of Jean-Luc Godard. From 1959 to 1967, Godard had imbued cinema with fresh ideas and innovative techniques, some highly successful and others at least interesting. Godard had systematically deconstructed several of the traditional genre, from the film noir (with A Bout de Souffle), to romance (with Masculine-Feminine, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and others), psychodrama (with Contempt) and both science fiction and detective films (with Alphaville). Now, he would deconstruct the road-film, though he had done so once already (with Pierrot le Fou). Inspired in part by Buñuel, he would also abandon plot almost entirely and concentrate on the irrational and the absurd. Weekend would also project Godard his furthest yet into politicization of film and set the stage for his total abandonment of commercial filmmaking in preference for political essays. Unfortunately, the dry political treatises that would follow Weekend would be very nearly without an audience. Weekend therefore has the weight of an historic farewell by Godard to traditional cinema and communication with the world at large.

The Story: Weekend consists of a series of largely nonsensical vignettes, vaguely strung together as a distorted kind of road-film. The focal characters are a married couple, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) Durand. They are French haut-bourgeoisie and right away we learn that they are highly amoral people. Their main concern is how to bump off Corinne's wealthy parents so that they can get hold of Corinne's future inheritance. Corrine's father is apparently institutionalized and one immediate concern for the Durands is that the mother might have the will rewritten to the disadvantage of Corinne. They've already made attempts on the lives of Corinne's parents, using such tactics as poison and oven gas, but without success. Unknown to Corinne, Roland also has a lover to whom he offers assurances, over the phone, that he'll bump off Corinne once her inheritance is settled. All of that may sound like the beginning of a plot, but it's really rather incidental to the film. Outside the Durand's apartment, a fight breaks out in the parking lot between the drivers of two cars in what amounts to road rage. One man is finally beaten to the ground and the other man and his wife drive off.

WARNING. THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH COULD BE CONSTRUED AS PORNOGRAPHIC. ALL VIRGINS SHOULD SKIP OVER IT!

In one of the more intriguing segments, Corinne, dressed only in bra and panties, relates to Roland, in details and specifics, a recent sexual encounter she had with a man, Paul, and his wife Monique – a ménage à trois. Corinne relates the episode in a calm, soft voice with organ music waxing and waning in the background. The discourse goes on for some five minutes or so but includes the following: "Paul told Monique to go on me. Paul stripped and flaunted his penis for me. He told Monique to take off my panties and made me kneel and put my head between Monique's legs. Now my back was turned to Paul. I remember that she parted my buttocks and he gazed at them all the time, then came closer and fingered them. The rest of the bottle [of wine] was poured out on my back. He had us switch places. She kissed my bush while I helped Paul screw her from behind." Later, Monique sat in the cat's dish of milk on top of the refrigerator while Corinne and Paul masturbated. The scene ends with Paul cracking eggs between Corinne's buttocks. Roland, whose interest is clearly piqued, inquires, "Is this true or a nightmare?" Corinne replies, "I don't know." (We're still in the first ten minutes or so of the film! Keep in mind, also, that Mireille Darc, who plays Corinne, is an exceptionally fine panther-like woman with a sexy, raspy voice like that of Mae West).

Roland and Corinne are heading out for a visit with Corinne's mother. In the parking lot, Roland backs into another car. A young lad whose family owns the damaged car is playing nearby and demands that Roland "exchange particulars." Roland threatens to kick the boy in his particulars and, then, when the boy shouts for his mother, offers to bribe him to shut up. The mother appears as Roland attempts to flee the scene in his car. The woman grabs Roland around the waist to prevent him from escaping. Corinne jumps out of the car and removes a can of stray paint from the trunk of their car. Roland proceeds to spray paint both the woman and her car. Then, as Roland and Corinne drive off, the woman whacks tennis balls at them, as her husband arrives with a shotgun. It's just another average day in the parking lots of Paris!

On the road, Roland and Corinne encounter a mammoth traffic jam – probably the most famous one in cinematic history. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard films this vignette in one long continuous tracking shot from a few feet off the right side of the road, at an angle perpendicular to the highway. The Coutards, in their small, black convertible, decide to drive down the left lane in order to skip ahead of the backed-up traffic. They are in the back of the field of view of the camera as both they and the camera glide slowly past one vehicle after another. There's an overturned heap, people sitting on their hoods and rooftops playing ball, horns blaring constantly, zoo trucks with lions and llamas, men playing chess, a horse-drawn cart, a man reading to his children on the grassy apron, a Shell Gas truck, a small white car facing backwards, a car with its doors wide open, a sail boat, and, finally, at the front of the line, the inevitable accident. Several cars are piled up and mangled bodies are strewn all around.

Roland and Corinne finally pass the pinch point and turn right onto a country road. They stop in a small village. Another accident has occurred there, involving a small Triumph convertible and a tractor. The driver of the Triumph is bloodied and obviously dead. His girlfriend (Juliet Berto) is abusing the driver (Georges Staquet) of the tractor, with all sorts of insults, such as "You wretched great shit-heap you!" Many of the epithets smack of classist elitism on the girl's part. When the tractor driver declares that he has witnesses, pointing to Roland and Corinne, the pair quickly drives away.

Back on the road, it starts to rain. Roland and Corinne stop for a single hitchhiker, a girl (Virginie Vignon) in a red coat with white boots, only to discover that her boyfriend (Daniel Pommereulle) is nearby and is packing a gun. They want to go to Mantes la Jolie and, discovering it's in the other direction, force Roland and Corinne to turn the car around, effectively hijacking them and their car. The man with the gun introduces himself as Joseph Balsamo, a.k.a., The Exterminating Angel (a reference to Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel) and his girlfriend as Marie-Madeleine. Despite his assertion that "Christianity is a refusal of self-knowledge," Balsamo claims to be the son of God and Alexander Dumas, adding the God was an old queer. "He screwed Dumas and I'm the result. Thus, I'm God." Corinne and Roland make inconsequential attempts to call for aid when cars speed by in the opposite direction. "I'm here to inform these Modern Times," Balsamo continues, "of the Grammatical Era's end and the beginning of flamboyance, especially in cinema." Roland and Corinne are shaken out of their comfortable skepticism when Balsamo makes a rabbit appear miraculously from under the dashboard. He offers to grant them any wish, if they'll only take him to London. Roland asks for "a big Mercedes sports car," Corinne for "an Yves St. Laurent evening dress," Roland for "a Miami Beach hotel," Corinne for natural blond hair," Roland for "a squadron of Mirage jets, like the yids used to thrash the wogs," and Corinne for "a weekend with James Bond." "You creeps, I give you nothing," says The Exterminating Angel. Well, that's more than Roland and Corinne can abide. They stop at a junkyard, overpower their hitchhikers, and chase them off with their own gun. Balsamo makes a flock of sheep appear miraculously, in the field, but it makes no difference.

Roland and Corinne are now speeding down the highway, running cyclists, motorists, and pedestrians alike off the roadway. Their recklessness soon culminates in another multi-car pileup, from which only Roland and Corinne walk away. "Freedom is violence!" we are told by one of the frequent inter-titles (in the fashion of Buñuel's L’Age D’Or). Walking through a field, the Durands cross paths with Saint-Just (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who is spouting revolutionary invectives: "I see naught but constitutions steeped in gold, pride, and blood and nowhere do I see the sweet humanity and equable moderation which ought to be the foundation of the social treaty." [Later that year, Godard would declare himself a committed Marxist-Leninist and abandon commercial cinema for its capitalist associations.] Soon, the Durands find a phone booth, which is occupied by a man (also Léaud), singing an extended message into the receiver. They impatiently demand the man's attention and a ride is his small Porsche into Oinville. The man offers to take Corinne but not Roland, his car having only two seats. A tussle ensues as the Durands attempt to steal the man's car, but he gains the upper hand and drives away.

The Durands are back to walking. They come across another multi-car accident and try in vane to extract directions to Oinville from the corpses. Roland finally recognizes the futility, declaring, "These twits are dead." They head down a wooded dirt road and encounter none other than Emile Brontë (Blandine Jeanson) out for a walk with Tom Thumb (Yves Afonso). The Durands want information. Emile asks, "Poetical information or physical information?" "What a rotten film," replies Roland, "All we meet is crazy people." All they can get out of Emile and Tom are literary and philosophical observations. Losing patience, Roland and Corinne set fire to Brontë's skirt. "It's rotten of us, isn't it, says Corinne, "We've no right to burn even a philosopher." Roland is less convinced: "Can't you see they're only imaginary characters?" "Why is she crying then," wonders Corinne. "No idea," replies Roland, "let's go."

The Durands stop in a field long enough to soliloquize ponderously over a worm. "We're totally ignorant of each other. We're totally ignorant of what the worm is. We're both enigmas. Anyone who denies it is the most ignorant of all." [Deep Godard wisdom, there!] "I bet the old witch will have altered the will already," says Corinne, while stealing the pants off a dead man at another car wreck. "A little torture will take care of that," replies Roland.

Roland and Corinne hop a ride on a truck, but have to agree to help the man (Paul Gégauff) with his upcoming concert. Soon, the man's Bechstein grand piano has been set up in a barnyard and he's playing a Mozart Sonata for a mildly interested group of farmhands and farm animals. Coutard's camera takes two full 360 degree sweeps around the rustic setting as the pianist extemporizes on what is wrong with modern classical music, declaring Mozart's harmonies the best. He wonders at the royalties that Mozart could have earned today, instead of ending up, as he did, in a pauper's cemetery. "Mozart is too easy for children," he declares, "and too difficult for virtuosos."

After the concert, Roland and Corinne disembark from the pianist's truck, a bit further down the road, and alternate giving each other piggyback rides. Exhausted finally, they try to flag down a ride. A car comes by and the driver inquires, "Are you in a film or in reality?" Corinne slips off into a roadside gully for a nap. A man comes by, asks Roland for a light, spots Corinne, and asks Roland is she's his. Roland says no, so the man proceeds to rape Corinne. As Corinne cries out, Roland smokes his cigarette in total disinterest. Another car comes by, but refuses Roland a ride when he gives the wrong answer to the questions, "Would you rather be screwed by Mao or Johnson?" The rapist emerges from the gully, buttons his clothing, and wanders off. Corinne rejoins her husband. A third car drives up and this time the test question is, "Who attacked first? The Israelis or the Egyptians?" Another wrong answer elicits the accusation, "Bloody ignoramus."

Finally, the couple gets a ride on a yellow garbage truck, but have to collect and empty garbage cans along the way. The regular workers, one a black man and the other an Arab (László Szabó), are taking their lunch break. The black man offers Roland a tiny piece of his sandwich, declaring it equal to the fraction of the U.S. budget given to the Congo. Corinne has to pay for a piece of the other man's sandwich with a kiss, which the man declares to be equivalent to the exploitation of third world countries by the Western democracies. The Arab declares, "My black brother speaks for me," whereupon the black man offers an extended leftist diatribe, though the camera remains fixed on the Arab. Then the pattern is reversed, with the Arab speaking for the black man and the camera again on the non-speaker. There are periodic flashbacks to earlier segments of the film (the traffic jam, the burning of Brontë). The Arab declares, "Mankind reaches its highest state of barbarism when it reaches the stage of military democracies."

Roland and Corinne finally disembark from the garbage truck at Oinville. Corinne takes a bath. Next to the tub, there's a painting of a nude woman on the wall, but Corinne's breasts are discretely off-screen. Roland reads a book about a hippopotamus and its contract with God. There's an intercut to a scenic shot of provincial life. At last, Roland and Corinne arrive at the home of Corinne's mother. After dickering over percentages (each party's take of the inheritance) fails to satisfy Roland and Corinne, they beat the old woman to death. Then, they dump her body inside a plane wreck in a field and set it on fire.

Running off into the woods, Roland and Corinne come across some families having a picnic and attempt to steal their food. Their petty theft is interrupted by the arrival of a couple of gun-totting terrorists (Yves Beneyton and Anne Wiazemsky) of the FLSO. They take a few hostages, including Roland and Corinne, and shoot the other poor slobs. The hostages are taken to a terrorist camp deep in the woods, beside a lake or river. One terrorist has a drum set and beats out tympani riffs. A young female hostage is turned over to the cook, Ernest (Ernest Menzer), who is invited to screw her before cooking her. He forces her to strip, but settles for breaking some eggs on her crotch and inserting a large dead fish in her vagina (like the apple in a hog's mouth). Roland decides to make a run for it, but is brought down and disemboweled by a terrorist's slingshot. A pig and a goose are brutally slaughtered, on camera. The drummer performs an extended revolutionary diatribe, rap style, including greetings to the ancient ocean.

A hostage exchange is arranged. The head of the terrorist group (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), who wears a blue military jacket, wants his moll, Valérie (Valérie Lagrange), released and has offered up Corinne Durand in exchange. The exchange goes awry, however, and ends up in a shootout. Valérie is hit by a bullet and sings this song as she dies:

How happy I'd be if you knew,
You, who I'm leaving tonight,
That though it seems everything's through
To others it seems it's all right.
A smile, though the heart may be torn,
Pretend that it's not past mending.
Write the last word, so forlorn,
Just a novel with an unhappy ending.

When Valérie succumbs, the terrorist leader makes his getaway and Corinne impulsively joins him, apparently choosing revolution over her old bourgeois existence. Back at camp, a stew composed of the less fortunate hostages, including Roland, is served up and Corinne is delighted to ask for seconds. The leader offers up some last thoughts about "man's immense horror for his fellows" and the picture fades to a final title card: "Fin de Cinema." It is "the end of cinema," at least for Jean-Luc Godard.

Themes: Some of Godard's intents with this film are clear enough, if for no other reason than the familiarity of his ideas from other films. Once again, for example, Godard is railing against consumerism and its ally, capitalism. The Durands are a caricature of greed, which leads to a loss of both deeper interests in life and basic morality. A related theme, also back again from previous Godard outings, is classism and the supposed antithesis, Marxism. By Godard's reckoning, an excess of consumerism leads to classism and a violation of a just social contract, which would require "equable moderation." The problem with Godard's reckoning is that those societies that have incorporated Marxism have nevertheless ended up with classism. Moreover, consumerism can be a positive, when it's non-exploitive. It creates jobs.

What's relatively new, thematically, in Weekend is a more strident tone and sense of urgency about the moral decay of Western civilization. Weekend can be viewed as one long road trip through a progressively degenerating social milieu, from rage and greed, to disregard for death, corpse robbing, rape, murder, terrorism, bestiality, and, finally, cannibalism. There's no coherence to the presentation of the issue, however. The revolutionaries are the worst of the lot and imply no greater hope. The depictions of moral decay are so blatantly exaggerated and sensationalized as to lose any validity as rational argument. The leftist diatribes scattered through this film are precisely the type that devastate the credibility of everyone who speaks for the left side of the political spectrum. The speeches have a sing-song quality and draw on every overworked and irrational leftist cliché, making a mockery of what rational leftists try to advocate.

One interesting though oblique theme of this film is the issue of censorship. It is implied during Corinne's sexy monologue near the film's beginning when the music grows louder just as she gets to the most provocative words and phrases, as though some unseen censor had insisted on drowning out the offending words. Obviously, with the subtitles for English viewers, that idea loses some of its potency. Then, the issue returns in the bathroom scene when Corinne's erotic parts are discretely hidden from view while an erotic nude painting is in plain view in the background. Here, at least, Godard had something cogent to say.

Production Values: There are plenty of champions for this film and I've read about twenty such reviews and comments (as well as a similar number of opinions highly adverse to the film). I have yet to find a review that effectively states a positive reason for treasuring this film, with the possible exception of those who find in "hilarious." The humor value of a film, in my opinion, is not an arguable issue. If a film makes you laugh, it has good comedy value for you. If it fails to make me laugh or even provide amusement, then it's worthless as comedy for me. A few reviewers champion this film for it humor value; I've watched it twice, now, and found none in it remotely humorous.

Otherwise, the champions of this film laud it entirely on the basis of what it does not do. It is innovative, we are told, because it has no plot, has no logic or coherence, has no apparent structure, adheres to none of the social niceties, offers no hope or solutions, provides no likable characters, and makes no overt thematic arguments. Godard, we are told, makes no concessions to his audience, intentionally setting out to provoke and antagonize us. In short, Godard obliterates most of the conventions of filmmaking and, we are told, the film is therefore marvelously revolutionary. The same thing, I might point out, could be accomplished by inserting blank celluloid into a projector. One reviewer actually argues that the value of the film lies in being so incomprehensible that it forces viewers to think for themselves. A void will have that effect, but it's infinitely more rewarding to have one's own thinking challenged and enriched by some positive impetus from the material with which one is engaged.

Actually, there are two "conventions" that Godard retains for this film – ones that had characterized his films from the beginning. There's the usual string of referential and self-referential allusions, to his films and the books and films by others that he treasures. Then, there's the endless parade of distanciation techniques aimed at ensuring that we never lose sight of the fact that we're watching a film. Characters repeatedly assume a meta-perspective, talking about the film itself. There're the frequent title cards, non sequiturs in the dialog, characters with whom viewers cannot identify, and insertion of political diatribes bearing no relationship to the on-going story. Yes, Godard has retained two conventions for this film, but they are two of the most tiresome ones, largely of his own construction.

There's a couple of interesting cinematic gimmicks highlighted in this film. The eight-minute long tracking shot through the traffic jam is rightfully famous. Then, there're two pans of 360 degrees at the farmyard. They're both effective sequences, from a cinematographic point of view. The music by Antoine Duhamel nicely embellishes the noir aspects of the film.

Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc deserve major kudos for daring to appear in such a silly and controversial film. Both were established stars when this film was made and had their reputations to consider. I fell madly in love with Mireille Darc from the moment I first saw her in The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972). On that basis alone, I had high hopes for Weekend, before seeing it the first time. Darc herself doesn't disappoint. In fact, she's the main saving grace. Jean Yanne later appeared in a couple of Chabrol films that I've reviewed: Le Boucher (1969) and This Man Must Die (1970). He's a talented performer. Jean-Pierre Léaud has a bit part in Weekend, but was famous for appearances in such films as The 400 Blows (1959), Alphaville (1965), Masculine-Feminine (1966), Stolen Kisses (1968), Two English Girls (1971), Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Mother and the Whore (1973), and Day for Night (1973).

Bottom-Line: The problem, I think, with this film is that with it, Godard irrevocably slipped out of the domain inhabited by innovative progressives, liberals, and even revolutionaries into a foggy realm of bleak-minded misanthropes. In Weekend, Godard comes across as one of those chronic complainers unable to offer any constructive or positive ideas. In the end, this film is little more than innovation for innovation's sake, tearing down conventional approaches to filmmaking left and right, but offering nothing worthwhile as fair trade. There are a few scenes, taken independently, that are creative and strike a responsive chord, but the film, taken as a whole, is slovenly work. Weekend is in (mostly) French with English subtitles and has a running time of 105 minutes.

Recommended:
No

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age