"Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) are a bourgeois couple, although each has a secret lover and conspires to murder the other. They set out by car for Corinne's parents' home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, resolving to resort to murder if necessary." So begins Wikipedia's summation of Godard's Week-end. Along the way, the two characters encounter car accidents, a long traffic jam, a shooting or two, hippies, theft, rape, animal killing, and cannibalism. And a lot of political philosophy/propaganda.I'm unable to finish this movie. I like some Godard films like À bout de soufflé, Vivre Sa Vie and Le Mepris, but this one just makes me nauseous. All the blood, all the contemptible, absurd behavior... I guess that was Godard's intent - to make us feel his repulsion toward modern capitalist society. Unfortunately he doesn't show us a solution, and the film's ending is quite depraved.So if you feel like being nauseous, check this one out. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and go for a nice nature walk instead.

Jen Luc-Goddard's "Weekend" is a strange art film. Goddard uses garish colour and strange camera shots and editing cuts throughout the film to give it an anarchistic feeling. Fitting, as this film is about the collapse of society during a weekend car trip. I think. The film features a number of characters who are completely off their rockers. There is a roadside robbery by Jesus (or God? or God's grandson?), inexplicable on camera animal killings (real, I think), cannibals, murder and a ton of car's honking. I do not know what else to say about this film really apart from what it made me feel, which was a bit confused. The film is about anarchy and chaos, and the way it is shot is increasingly disjointed as society continues to crumble. Their is also a ton of political commentary about consumerism, neo-colonialism and class division. When this film ended, I really did not know whether I liked it or not. It had some good dark-humour and was interestingly shot, but made little sense beyond that, and left me thinking of an art school project.All in all, this was a disjointed art film about anarchy, and I didn't like it or dislike it. It just is. It exists. Why, I cannot say. Recommended for fans of Goddard, and anarchists I guess. 5/10

As anyone who has the slightest interest in Jean-Luc Godard's career knows (and that would be anyone interested in "modern" cinema), WEEKEND marked the end of his early career, a 15-film run from 1959's BREATHLESS to this film in 1967. Few in the history of film have ever been as productive, as provocative, and as influential. One thing that has happened in the last decade or so is that many of the films from this era have been restored and re-released in the United States: BREATHLESS, MY LIFE TO LIVE, CONTEMPT, BAND OF OUTSIDERS, PIERROT LE FOU, MASCULINE FEMININE, MADE IN U.S.A. (finally having its first US commercial release), 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, LA CHINOISE and now WEEKEND. WEEKEND begins as a rude and vicious satire in which people in cars become violent at the slightest provocation. It proceeds with a bourgeoise couple (Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne) who are bored with each other, openly contemptuous, and seemingly ready to kill. There is the wife's erotic confession, delivered in a quiet deadpan as she is shown in silhouette. This is only the first of many virtuoso sequences which show Godard at his most formally inventive. As soon as the couple gets in their car to begin a journey (they've decided to kill her mother for the inheritance), the viewer knows this journey is one which isn't going to end as expected. And it doesn't. Whimsy, annoyance, rage, disgust and horror greet the couple as this picaresque lurches from Rabelaisean to de Sade (and beyond).When the movie first opened, Renata Adler in the New York Times wrote that the movie "was hard to take." In a sense, the years have been kind: there are now movies filled with such horrors that WEEKEND can only seem mild-mannered. But as an intellectual provocation, WEEKEND remains a scintillating experience. It should be noted that in 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER and LA CHINOISE, Godard presented his protagonists in ripe, sensual, adoring close-ups; here, everything is presented in medium or long-shot, so that the characters are kept at a distance. Yet Godard is always ready with another joke to keep the movie buoyant: his apocalyptic vision can't help but be filled with passionate rage and humor.

I've thrown rocks at cops in protest rallies in my angsty youth, if nothing else at least I can understand anger and outrage as expression of political sentiment. I can also understand the folly of that violence. With a film like Week End, do we give Godard his satire or do we bemoan how blunt it is? Inasmuch as the film is an opportunity to express politics rather than a forum to discuss them, I'm willing it to give Godard the stage to see what he has to say. Is the vehicular havoc of the beginning "a scene of Parisian life", perhaps, Paris is notorious for its traffic jams, but the famous tracking shot that defines this part of the movie plays out like a tableaux of Tati humour, except there's no charm in its delicacy, the intended effect is horn-blaring cacophony. It gets the point across, this is a world of madness and hysteria we're tracking through.But what about the politics expressed here, once the amusing novelty wears off what happens inside this apocalyptic landscape of provincial roads littered with corpses and wrecked cars? A film doesn't need to resort to protest rally sloganeering to be agitprop, but when it does, when it quotes from Marx and Engels, when the US and Israel is the source of evil (curiously enough, France is not singled out among the imperialists), when the actual problems of Africa are trivialized in the manner of reading from a pamphlet, does that reveal a filmmaker who doesn't know any better or one that does but chooses to obfuscate the bigger picture to promote an ideology? I guess I'm wondering if the malice is naive or deliberate. If it was any other filmmaker I might begin to consider that the intended message is also an object of outrage and ricidule, but for someone who was a proclaimed Maoist, I can't help but shudder at the thought that he means what he says.Godard seems to me like he's the bourgeoisie of cinema, exactly what he despises. Having solved his apparent problems, he turns to the world to find a source of vexation to complain about. There's an insatiable hunger here to point out wrongs and shake fists in the air, nothing to love or embrace or attempt to understand. If he's not sneering at his own countrymen, he will speak on behalf of blacks or Arabs or he will make idiotic claims about modern music. His little reenactment of a revolution in the Parisian countryside is a mockery of that revolution.To paraphrase the words of one of his characters, likely there are more terrifying things to contemplate than the strange nature of man, but Godard can't even contemplate that strange nature. Likely he can understand it, he's an intelligent film mind and in the first few minutes seemingly without effort he creates a marvelous game of deceit, but he's too busy humiliating it, too busy trying to provoke a response to really evoke something. Fin du cinema, only for him maybe.