What if on the day, you went out for a family picnic the world fell apart.This is as absurd, anarchistic, and pretentiously french as you can possibly imagine, and then a little more so.
This was perhaps the WORST movie that I have ever seen. It had it's moments, certainly.
This was the culmination of almost seven years of work for Godard; arriving at a point in which his command of the film-making process was at its most confident and his talent as both a satirist and a grand provocateur could be channelled into making his ultimate statement - about society, cinema and the future of both - in such a way as to act as the bridge between the work that came before, and the work that would eventually follow. With Week End (1967), the intention was to confront the audience with the ultimate depiction of bourgeois decadence in all its morally-bankrupt banality; extending on the ideas behind his previous film, the complicated 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) - in which prostitution was used as a metaphor for a vapid consumer society willing to confine itself to ineffective action, whilst simultaneously selling itself out for the comfort of life's little luxuries - and all the while creating a merciless parody of the decline of western civilisation in a way that seems frighteningly close to the world that we live in today.
Week End (1967) ** 1/2 (out of 4) A husband (Jean Yanne) and wife (Mireille Darc), both having affairs and wanting the other dead, take a weekend trip to her dying father's house so that they can make sure they are in his will. Along the way they get in major traffic jams, get kidnapped by Jesus, run into various weirdos including a cannibal group and other strangeness.
Jean-Luc Godard was one of the most important directors during the French New Wave, after it he has often been seen as one of the most influential filmmakers ever. His influence can be seen in the work of directors such as Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino and Wim Wenders.
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.
I have a sense that losing Anna Karina changed Godard as a director, and that Week End is the fullest and most fascinating expression of this change -- a shift into a fury against the world so intense that it blights many of the humane qualities which dominate his earlier movies. Week End, along with La Chinoise, definitely marks the end of the manic, youthful, bursting-with-energy early phase of Godard's work, a period that was dominated by Karina's performances.
Warning: animal abuse, actual animal killed. Godard slaughters a pig on camera.
A couple prepares for the weekend. He doesn't love her, she doesn't love him.
