Adrift in the Cosmos

Corinne: Didn't you heard what he said? Marx says we're all brothers!
Roland: Marx didn't said that. Some other communist said that. Jesus said that.

By far, weekend is one of the meanest of all movies (Gummo as a close second :)) I ever enjoyed! It distressed me, troubled me a lot and most of the times…made me frustrated, because weekend is an amazingly arrogant and self-opinionated movie. Godard cherishes breaking the rules but in weekend through minuscule details he proved how meticulously one director can arrange a *carnival* (for the sake of a movie) to split off all possible conventions of movie making; whether it’s the narration, the slices of french history, the insane bombs of discourses on the screen, amalgam of marx and pop, the random deaths of Parisian bourgeois…you just name it!

Corinne (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne) is a detestable parisian couple irked with each other (both have lovers (?)) and waiting for the death of Corinne’s rich father to possess the inheritance. Both confessed plans to their respective lovers to murder the other as soon they collect the money out of Corinne’s family. They made a scheme to drive to the suburban home of Corinne’s parents to accelerate the death of Corinne’s father. Little they were aware of what mammoth bizarreness was awaiting for them in the trip.

Almost immediately after the couple begins the weekend trip on the sports car, they get into a proverbial “surreal” weirdest traffic jam…a virtually ten minute long tracking shot of a country road clogged with cars and corpses, accidents, endless honking, pastime games, class struggles, tractor killing a sporty fiancé and what not! The couple meets a French revolutionary hero Camille Saint (portrayed by my favorite Jean-Pierre Leaud) and poet Emily Bronte (whom they set on fire), listen to Mozart sonatas on a grand piano in a firm, get lectured on Marxist ideas on third world politics by a garbage man and finally pressurized to join a group of hippie radicals (who living in woods and the leader of this cannibals plays drums in middle of the jungle).

I must confess here that I could not grasp succinctly all the aspects (and all what were happening) of the film. At times I did feel that Godard is trying to pitch all his anti-bourgeois proposals with a mannerism. But with his sheer talent of movie making, whatever came to his head also became a part of his own class. I deeply regard the comment of Ray on Godard; in order to turn convention upside down, one needs a particularly firm grip on convention itself. This Godard had, thanks to years of assiduous film studying at the Cinematheque in Paris. (From – Our films their films)

For anyone interested in bit of historical anecdotes, Weekend was Godard’s farewell movie for this ordinary world (I doubt if he really had any absurd dream of hitting the box market with his earlier movies) before devoting himself in movie making with the Dziga Vertov Group (producers of low budget movies without mostly any commercial ambition). But in spite of all the bizarreness weekend does a classic cinematic adventure resembling a carnival trip. It is a fusion of partly anti-bourgeois ethics and deep leftist propaganda with a layer of bizarre surrealism. Watch it at your earliest.

Week End (1967)
Directed By : Jean-Luc Godard