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Weekend (DVD, 2005)
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- Buy It NowWEEKEND 1967 JEAN-LUC GODARD FILM NEW YORKER 2005 DVD SEALED MINT
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This was certainly an important film for viewers in the 1960s, but I think to an audience of today there are many better Godard pictures, including Breathless, Une femme est une femme, Bande a part, Masculin feminin, Vivre sa vie, and Les mepris. Weekend includes an incredible minutes-long pan of an avenue in the French countryside with a traffic jam and accidents and carnage, periodically interrupted in true Godardian fashion with very existential intertitles. There is also a woman describing a bizarre orgy in a way that compares favorably with a more pedestrian scene in the same vein in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). The middle of the film is pretty dull, and the costumes that many of the characters wear are ridiculous (probably on purpose, or because of the small working budget of the film). The last 20 minutes or so are shocking, unique, and unlike anything we've seen before. Godard shoots in long shots to avoid us developing any attachment to the people who are about to be humiliated, degraded, and/or killed. There is some bizarre cannibal humor and the actual slaughter of first a large pig (with a sledgehammer and then a knife) and secondly a chicken. Godard's usual stars, including Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, are not here, which probably benefits the film because it is all about a Brechtian focus on exploring ideas and not being swept away by moviemaking as such. Weekend compares well with Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen), because in both Godard brings up important questions and does not distract the viewer with easy "Hollywood" or even old French cinematic touches. The scholar of Godard must watch this film repeatedly. I would recommend watching it in 2 sittings--it's a lot to take in. Interesting note: right after Godard made this film, he realized he was a Marxist-Leninist and could no longer raise money for his films in the same "capitalist" way he had been doing for the last 8 years. He went on to do more ideological and less fun films, such as Tout Va Bien (All is Well) with Jane Fonda and The Rise and Fall of a Small Cinema Company. Godard was born around 1930. He studied at the Sorbonne in the 1940s and wrote for Cahiers du cinema (Notebooks on Cinema) in the 1950s. His colleague at Cahiers, Francois Truffaut would introduce the auteur theory of filmmaking in 1954. Godard has only married once. His only wife was Anna Karina (also his star). They were married from 1961 to 1967. They together started Anouchka Films in the mid-1960s. Godard's work of the 1960s seems more vital than that of most other directors, with the possible exceptions of Francois Truffaut and Federico Fellini. Inferiors include (in my view): Antonioni (except in the exquisite L'Avventura), Agnes Varda, Roger Vadim, most American directors, and Volker Schlondorff. Best Godard films: 1. Bande a part 2. A Bout de souffle 3. Masculin feminin 4. Vivre sa vie / My Life to Live 5. Une femme est une femme 6. Les mepris / Contempt (Brigitte Bardot) 7. Weekend 8. Pierrot le Fou 9. Les CarabiniersRead full review
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