Unless you're the kind of viewer who's naturally drawn to and in sync with the unflinching, provocatively hostile attitude of Jean-Luc Godard at his most intentionally alienating (and yes, I know there are more than a few viewers out there who gravitate effortlessly to this very sort of thing), there are a few items that I think it's good to know heading into a first watch of Week End. These first few paragraphs are written more as an introduction to the film, for the sake of any readers who might be interested to know my thoughts about it before venturing themselves into the melee that Godard constructed over a few weeks in September 1967, just as the legendary "Summer of Love" was winding down (in other parts of the world, anyway; I don't think Godard ever got swept up into the Flower Power ethos.)
For those who've seen it before, my summary will serve as a refresher, and I'll get a little bit more into interpretation and detailed analysis toward the end of the essay. As is the case with the rest of Godard's post-1965 output, I think it helps considerably to do some prep work in advance of putting in the disc to watch this film. His earlier stuff still benefits from reading about the context in which the respective movie under investigation was made, but by the time he got to say, Masculin feminin, the self-referential context and increasing disdain for carrying his audience along through conventional narratives to communicate his point had escalated to a level that is bound to leave a lot of viewers (including myself) either bored or baffled or both, without acclimating ourselves to Godard's concerns during the making of the film. So let's get on with this primer on Week End. (I'm going by the way that the title is displayed in the opening credits and the accompanying trailer, even though it's usually spelled out as Weekend nowadays.)
1. Week End is the last entry in an important body of work, so it's best to catch up with earlier Godard before watching this one. The film was Godard's final expression in the 1960s of what's considered popular commercial cinema, though in this case, both descriptors probably require quotes to inform the reader that the film is neither "popular" nor "commercial" in the common sense of those words. It's a film drenched in cynicism in regard to the French middle class, frustration at the prevailing status quo in society at large, and fueled by an intense sense of urgency and obligation on the director's part to, at the very least, shake his audience out of any sense of complacency they might have felt at the mounting national and international crises that loomed as 1967 transitioned into 1968. In that sense, this is a very good film to watch at the end of a year, since it really does aim to plant a marker in time that forces us to consider "what happens next, and what am I prepared to do about it?" wherever we may be at in our lives.
2. Week End was created under adversarial circumstances. Godard took the job to direct this movie somewhat grudgingly. Even though he had a lot of autonomy as to the story and situations he chose to put on film, he was required to work under some constraints imposed upon him by the joint French/Italian production team that agreed to fund the project, which fueled Godard's animosity and created tensions on the set. Chief among his obligations was the casting in the lead roles of two relatively popular stars in the French TV and movie scene at the time. Mireille Darc was the female star, familiar to contemporary audiences as a cute petite blonde who took on sexy roles in films that Godard's biographer Richard Brody described as "vapid eroticism." In her view, working with Godard was a coup that raised her profile and might have conceivably launched her into more artistically respectable and substantial roles, so she was fully compliant and respectful during the shoot. Godard, resentful at having this blandly conventional adornment of bourgeois diversions forced upon him, sadistically took advantage of her earnest desire to cooperate by pressing her into ever more degrading situations. Early in the film, he has Darc stripped down to a bra and panties (though she's heavily backlit so not much detail shows up on screen) as she recites a lurid account of an erotic encounter that was remarkably lewd for its time. (The subtitles make the dialog stand out more than it actually does in the soundtrack, where her mumbled words are often drowned out by a loud and absurdly ominous musical accompaniment that imparts an atmosphere of dread into the scene.) The scene is supposedly a parody of a similar narrative delivered by Bibi Andersson in Persona, but feels much more ephemeral and inconsequential than the corresponding segment in Bergman's film.
As the film progresses, Darc is dragged into frequent arguments and shouting matches with her on-screen husband, played by Jean Yanne, an actor who'd done some credible work with directors like Claude Chabrol, Claude Lelouch and even Preston Sturges (in a small role) since the early 1950s but was a fairly drab male lead for a director accustomed to having stars like Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Pierre Léaud at his disposal. (Léaud does appear in two minor roles and I'll get to that later.) Eventually, she's observed screaming over a destroyed Hermes handbag while crawling out of flaming wreckage after a car crash. Her hair gets pulled, she bites the hands of men grabbing her, she's thrown to the ground and kicked. She sprawls herself in the middle of the road with her legs spread apart as a semi truck bears down on her, only to get up and dash out of the way at the last instant. She's assaulted and raped in a ditch off screen while her husband sits passively nearby, and finally makes her exit from the film in a flourish of brainwashed cannibalism. An interview included as a supplement on the Criterion Collection disc, recorded in January just a few weeks after Week End had been released, gives evidence that Darc was either oblivious to Godard's reported cruelty toward her, or didn't want to complain about it publicly since she didn't have the stature to risk aggravating the great auteur. Or maybe she was just a good sport who enjoyed the experience of being roughed up at Godard's behest. She does acknowledge that "we're all a bit masochistic" in response to one of the questions. But this aggressive treatment of his leading actress is perfectly in keeping with Godard's pattern going back to his early work with by then ex-wife Anna Karina. Even though he had remarried by this time (to 19 year old Anne Wiazemski, best known for her role in Au hasard Balthasar), it feels like JLG was still working through some deep seated anger and sadness toward women by putting his female leads through the wringer of abuse and trauma in most of his major films. Here, it feels like he takes it to a new level.
3. This is the expression of a troubled and desperate man. The most important idea to keep in mind as we're watching Week End, in my opinion, is that Jean-Luc Godard was going through a profound period of personal crisis that amounted to a loss of belief and confidence in just about everything that helped him achieve the early successes that allowed him to continue working even as his box office returns shriveled up. He was no longer enamored with classic American movies as a source of inspiration, and to me it's painfully obvious that he was swiftly running out of ideas on what to film next. One could even analyze Week End as a form of self-loathing sabotage, except that it feels distasteful to project too much into the inner mental workings of a man I know very little about beyond what I read in books, and nothing has led me to confidently draw such a conclusion. But Godard's immersion into a stern and uncompromisingly dogmatic form of radical politics hints at a deep-seated personal insecurity, a need to find some kind of firm foundation and trustworthy anchor in the midst of a turbulent life and a rapidly shifting cultural milieu. I understand Godard was hardly unique in his search for an ideological center of gravity that would rescue France from its slide into decadent consumerism and closer ties to the militaristic horrors that the USA was inflicting on the people of Vietnam and other oppressed people of the world. In 1967, interest in Maoism as an alternative to the traditional left/right political divide was nearing a fever pitch in certain intellectual circles. Godard, accustomed to being a leader in his sphere of influence, probably felt it was incumbent upon him to embrace and articulate the militant precepts of Mao's Cultural Revolution for his peers. I wish I had more convenient access to his earlier film from that year, La Chinoise, which hasn't been released by Criterion and is currently OOP in this country. That film features Wiazemsky and Léaud as two of a group of five French university students who form an idealistic but naive Communist cell over the course of a summer. From what I've read, La Chinoise isn't a manifesto of Godard's newly embraced political principles, but it shows him rapidly advancing on the path that would lead him to decide that a formal and absolute break from his past career as a cinematic movie director was necessary, for the sake of an equally necessary revolution in France's political landscape and collective social conscience.
Toward the end of the film, Week End surpasses La Chinoise in its radicalism by side-stepping most talk of a formally Communist insurrection and replacing it with the alternative of the FLSO, a band of roving anarchist hippies whose wanton violence dominates and defines the final twenty minutes of the film. Even with all the indulgences and absurdities that occur during the first hour, it's an extremely wild and messy conclusion that feels rather like an extended bit of surrealist improv tacked on at the end in order to give it sufficient feature length. An extended reading from the Comte de Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, with drumbeat accompaniment, certainly validates that impression. Maldoror was a favored text by the early Surrealists, who retrieved the 1869 prose poem from obscurity and popularized its self-consciously scandalous and misanthropic sentiments for future generations of angry young nihilists to quote and emulate. It was one of my favorite texts back in my teens and I was simultaneously amused and disturbed to see Godard quote it at length here. I understand and appreciate it's shock value, and I recognize Lautreamont's peculiar form of genius at concocting this exceedingly dark diatribe against all that is decent and sacred. But I also see the placement of the text, and it's implied endorsement, almost as an epilogue to all that's gone before it, as another indicator that Godard was on the verge of cracking up.
So to the first time viewers out there, keep these three points in mind as you watch and I think you'll find it more comprehensible and easier to digest. It helped me knowing these three things in my rewatch, after feeling too detached and disinterested in the whole project after the first time through. (I also advise not watching it when you're tired or under any mood altering influences, as you'll find yourself lost pretty quickly when the scenes transition without much guidance from the director.)
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An argument over a minor fender bender in their apartment's parking lot gives a foretaste of calamities to come, as Roland first assaults a young boy wearing an Indian feathered headdress who witnesses the collision, then tattles to his parents. When the mother comes out to survey the damage, the adults come to blows and Roland sprays her with paint. Eventually the boy's father comes out with a shotgun and sends the couple scrambling out onto the road. Then we get to the infamous 9 minute series of tracking shots that crawl past an elaborately staged traffic jam full of odd characters and ironic juxtapositions. It's an impressive, audacious and memorable sequence, the first of several similarly chaotic tableaux that build upon one of Godard's favorite tropes of the 1960's - death by car crash (featured prominently in Contempt and Pierrot le fou.) Here in Week End, I get the sense that Godard is going all out to top himself, sensing that his career was coming to an end and wanting to go out on a spectacular note. So we see an ever-increasing scale of chaos and destruction, with bigger flames, blacker and belchier smoke, mangled wreckage wrapped around trees, corpses strewn, streets smeared with enough blood to fill buckets. A small airplane and a car propped up entirely vertical on its front end find their way into one of the "sculptures" as the physics that supposedly led to such collisions become increasingly ludicrous and implausible. On one of the supplements, cinematographer Raoul Coutard spoke of the apparent joy that Godard took in constructing these heaps of twisted metal, often wielding a sledgehammer himself to make sure that the indentations turned out just so. The tension release, accompanied by such malicious glee, must have been therapeutic!
As Roland and Camille's journey is repeatedly interrupted, sidetracked and hijacked, Godard introduces a scattershot sampling of walk-on characters, some historic, some fictional, some anonymous and some hired extras identified as such in order to fulfill another one of his producers' obligatory checklist items. They each proceed to speak their bits as Godard's surrogate mouthpieces, to varying degrees of effectiveness in terms of entertainment and/or enlightenment. I won't bother to elucidate on the content of their utterances, since much of what they say feels quippy and extemporaneous to what was on Godard's mind at the time, without being really all that cogent in regard to the full impact that the film made on me. The scene of the two garbage truck drivers, one Arab and one African, who eat sandwiches on camera while their partner speaks their thoughts, is one worth drawing attention to, as the points they raise about Western imperialism and the mandate for armed and violent resistance by repressed victims of colonial exploitation are still made revolutionaries and anti-capitalists today, even though the Cold War background context has all but disappeared.
There's also a musical interlude that provides the stage for another memorable Godardian set-piece, a circular panning shot featuring a grand piano in a barnyard, surrounded by melancholy laborers and farming equipment. We get a brief glimpse of Anne Wiazemsky, along with the expected philosophical musings to the accompaniment of a Mozart piano sonata.
And here's another musical bit, featuring Jean-Pierre Leaud, the least insufferable of his two appearances in the film. :) Actually, I'm just kidding - I always appreciate his collaborations with Godard, he's consistently up for anything, the more boisterous the better. Right after this scene ends, he engages in a prolonged sketch of improvised slapstick violence with the lead couple when they try to steal his Porsche.
Eventually Camille and Roland stagger across the wasteland and reach their destination of Oinville, where her parents live, only to see their worst fears realized. The father has died and they have indeed been cut out of the inheritance. In response, they brutally murder Camille's mother, stabbing her to death in her driveway, in order to take what they think is rightfully theirs, but that criminal bond is not enough to draw them close enough together to fully reunite in mutual purpose. Their wanderings continue on aimlessly until they're taken captive, and they meet their eventual (and separate) fates which I'll leave viewers to discover and reflect on for themselves. This summary is just provided as a reminder that Week End does transmit a narrative arc. But the satisfactions, such as they are, to be found here are not based on the power of a story well-told. They're much more subjective to the experience and perspective of the individual viewer. Some, like this writer, delve deeply into the film's implications for cinema and construes many insightful observations on Godard's method and message. Here's an earnestly political and ideological take on the film that goes well beyond my capacity to extract meaningful value what seem to me more like sometimes vicious, sometimes vacuous provocations by the director, aimed at stirring up outrage or testing the limits of credulity afforded him by the intelligentsia (though I do appreciate the "four genre" theory presented in the opening paragraphs. Finally (and I could easily post more links here - if nothing else, Godard has attracted so many smart analytical writers to craft essays worth reading over the years), this review is simply well-written, detailed and insightful, with a robust discussion in the comments section for added value. (Thanks to Mark Stephan, who provided these links and more to me in his English Cigarette Film Club group on Facebook.)
Also: my friend (and new "official" member of Criterion Cast) Aaron West recorded this solo podcast last October, which IMO also makes for a solid introductory overview of Week End.
As for me, I'm satisfied to acknowledge Godard's mastery of his chosen medium, to stand in awe of his prolific output and adventurous creativity over an extended period of years - but at a distance. When it comes to French films with English titles of 1967, I'm much happier to dwell in PlayTime's world instead of Week End's! That's probably easily explained at least in part by the fact that I'm a content member of the modestly bourgeois class myself, and I know enough of them to rest assured that for the most part, they're not nearly as venal and nasty as Godard portrays them here. Still, I appreciate his bracing critique and will do what I can to apply his advice where it's needed.
But enough of this, I'm ready to move on to other things. The final season of Downton Abbey begins tonight, for starters.
Next: Zatoichi Challenged
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