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Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Dreadfully Boring

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

A supposedly idyllic week-end trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.Following World War II, the French grew increasingly supportive of communism. Maybe not as a whole, but the intellectuals (such as Sartre) embraced it, and it seems a natural reaction following the Nazi occupation of the 1940s. Rejecting the extreme right does tend to push ideology to the left.Here we have a surreal satire on the class struggle in France in the 1960s. One of the most radical countries during one of the most radical decades. Many have compared this to Luis Bunuel's "Discreet Charm" and with good reason. They can both be seen as the artistic expression of the disdain for the upper class. I dare say this is the better film, even if probably the lesser-known.

With a film like Weekend firmly secured under his belt, it's truly no wonder why French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has gone on to live in the hearts and minds of cinephiles young and old. Godard predicates himself off of convention-annihilation, otherwise known as destroying silently-accepted norms of filmmaking and with Weekend, it feels as if he held a book of cinematic conventions in his hand and went page-by-page, tearing each page out and proceeding to rip it up with great force.Running with this simile, Godard replaces each ripped-page with a page written all his own - pages that, unlike the predecessors, shatters all preconceived notions and silently-accepted conventions of cinema. The result is his 1967 film Weekend, a film that is one of the hardest pictures I've ever had to review or analyze. I suppose one could go through the film scene-by-scene and meticulously analyze what each one had to offer, but even that may make it difficult to come to conclusion. In my mind, it's best to watch Weekend from a distance and allow it to tamper with your mind and unfold like a violent trainwreck right before your eyes.We follow, through the best and worst of times, a French, bourgeois married couple, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc). After a lengthy monologue involving Corinne describe, in great detail, a sexual experience in a way that is equal parts erotic and haunting, so begins their journey to Corinne's parents' countryhouse in order out collect her dying father's inheritance. If worse comes to worse, the couple plans to marry the man in order to collect the money as soon as possible.The trip is a chaotic one to say the least, beautiful in a disturbing way and disturbing in a beautiful way. The couple drive through the countryside of France, witnessing all accounts of shallow human materialism and the pitiful ugliness of western civilization in the form of angry, restless citizens, violent acts committed over relatively trivial occurrences, and several car wrecks and burning vehicles scattered on the side of the road.Arguably the most iconic shot of Godard's entire career is the lengthy tracking shot following a traffic jam for approximately three-hundred meters. The shot lasts about seven minutes and is captured at a small distance from the traffic, and shows the congested right-lane up close while the left lane is vacant and shows Roland and Corinne cruising at a controlled speed while seemingly removing the chaos from their mind.In this shot, like almost every other shot in Weekend, one could determine its meaning in several ways. Too me, Godard seems to be using these two characters' nonchalant and unfazed reactions to a violent traffic jam as a commentary for the desensitization of westerners in the regard that so much tragedy and evil happens at an excelling rate, looking away or just moving along with the tragedy and catastrophic events seems to be the easiest way to go about things. In present day society, things like mass shootings, war, poverty, and other forms of social ugliness have plagued newspapers and TV stations worldwide, so with constant ugliness around us, it's as if looking the other way is what we are best at.Godard's tracking shot brilliantly shows this in a way that some will find excessive and others will find astounding. Godard also uses his trademarks here to further destroy conventional cinema, such as flashing title-cards on screen that may or may not have to do with the subject matter, frequent jump cuts, unsteady shots, and some of the coldest depictions of society I have yet to see. The end of the film shows numerous people and animals slaughtered for what reward? Serviceable food rations and some sort of celebratory ritual amongst a group of anarchists that spout incoherent speeches about what appears to be a cross between appreciation for the land as well as control over it? It's dark and often hard to watch.With that being said, to call Weekend a tough sit for one-hundred and four minutes is almost an understatement. I emerge with the same remarks I had about Godard's directorial debut Breathless in that I had more fun writing the review and talking about the film than I did actually enduring it. With his frequent interjection of title cards, jump cuts, overlapping and fading sound mixing, among many other unconventional tactics, it's as if Godard, in the wake of creating one of France's most provocative and daring films, is also trying to create one of the country's most unwatchable pictures in history. If the subject matter wasn't enough, you have a presentation equal to a waiter spilling hot soup on your lap at a diner - it's a disruption to what you expect and it's thoroughly uncomfortable.But that's what you get with Weekend and what you take away from the film Godard doesn't seem to mind much. Whether you see it as a critique of bourgeois society, a magnifying glass on the hellish state of blue collar society, how bourgeois society views the lower classes, or a depiction of the disgusting materialism of western culture (or a combination of the aforementioned ingredients like myself), it would appear that Godard doesn't mind what you find in it. Thinking about it at great length, I'm almost certain he doesn't care if you watch it to begin with or emerge with something to contemplate. In a way, that would be the same kind of selfishness that Godard seems to be condemning in this picture. Who says what you have to take away and how you have to take it?

When was the last time you had a hell lot of fun while watching a film? And we aren't even talking escapist, commercial popcorn flicks or sitcoms! Far from it. We're talking about an avant-garde surrealist film, highly disturbing yet darkly humorous at the same time….in French New Wave style! Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" (sometimes written "Week End") will guarantee a delightfully macabre ride through hell, as a husband and wife cheating on each other decide to ride to the country to secure inheritance from the parents of the wife, by possibly murdering her father! Sounds crazy? Not half as crazy as what ensues next as their journey turns into an outlandish odyssey through a nightmare full of traffic jams and gruesome car accidents and terrorists and hippies and cannibals! What "Weekend" is about is difficult to pen. Perhaps it is about Godard's bizarre vision of the apocalypse; of a bleak future that's going to see the end of civilization as we know it; a world in which people will turn on one another and start raping and looting and killing and eating each other! A world in which the bourgeois society will bear the brunt of its own materialistic trappings…when people will become so insensitive, they will even steal stuff off of dead bodies rather nonchalantly! Or perhaps "Weekend" is merely a black comedy built around everything Godard personally hated and wanted to make fun of, through the medium he knows best…cinema! And he pulls it off like there's no tomorrow! Sometimes he also resorts to self-parody! And for that, he uses some insane yet subtle absurdist humour. Blink and you may miss some of the gems and golden lines uttered in this film. Sample this: Roland (Jean Yanne) abandons (or loses) his car and starts out on foot with his wife Corinne (Mireille Darc ). On the way there are numerous mangled bodies, victims of car accidents and the remains of their vehicles lying around, but they are just casually ignored! Roland tries to ask directions to another character in the film, gets some loony response in return and comments "What a rotten film! All we meet are crazy people!" Godard, an eccentric auteur that he is, makes sure he frustrates his audiences as well as keeps them hooked with his bravura writing. Usage of intertitles isn't uncommon in a Godard film, but in "Weekend" they take on a new, entirely free form, get sprinkled arbitrarily between scenes, interrupting randomly yet trying to say something about the scene at hand. But they don't always take a serious form; sometimes some of the dialog uttered takes the form of intertitles, sometimes Godard tries to be funny by adding title cards like "A film found on scrap heap" to describe this motion picture! At other times we see some sharp political jibes.Then there are the typical Godard idiosyncrasies including a background score that sometimes drowns the dialog and appears out of nowhere and disappears just as suddenly as it appeared; some deliberate repetitions of scenes and dialogs as if it's some editing flaw! And let's not forget the over 8 minutes long tracking shot of a traffic jam accompanied by blaring car horns in the background and car drivers cursing each other in the foreground! This shot ends in an ironic fashion that reveals the cause of the jam! The film takes dramatic turns with one bizarre event after another, subjecting us to a savagely funny ride, with senseless political speeches, oddball camera-work and ultimately an allegorical, chaotic finale…..the aim was clearly to alarm the viewer and leave him/her in a jaw-dropped state! There are notable movie references....although it is difficult to say in one case; a "Persona"-esque (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) monologue of Corinne narrating a particularly wild sexual adventure, and in a nod to Luis Bunuel, perhaps, a title card that reads "The Exterminating Angel" (1962). Speaking of Bunuel, it is not difficult to find some creative similarities between "Weekend" and Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie". Nonetheless, this could be a first film of its kind for Godard (it is a significant departure compared to his earlier 60s works) and he makes sure he leaves no stone unturned in delivering a masterwork. "Weekend" could very well have been rechristened "Week End" (as it is known in some countries) owing to the fact that this was Godard's final film of his most celebrated cinematic period.Highly imaginative, but pure madness; Godard's "Weekend" = Luis Bunuel on steroids! Score: 10/10 (Hands down!)

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.