Movie Review – Week End

Week End (1967)
Written & Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

I have never felt as enamored with the French New Wave directors as I thought I should have been. I love the Italian New Wave, the British films of this period, with their social realism, are fascinating, and the later German New Wave is full of movies I adore. But I still struggle to really “get” the French New Wave. No director is a perfect example of this filmmaking movement more than Jean-Luc Godard. He was born to deconstruct and reconstruct cinema as a reaction to World War II and the ripples it continues to make in the West. After a decade of writing film criticism, he kicked off the New Wave with Breathless, examining American mob movie tropes mixed with Godard’s cinematic sensibilities. Week End represents the end of the New Wave period, released at the end of a year when Godard had two other films shown in cinemas. 

Week End follows Roland and Corrine, a bourgeois French couple with secret lovers and passing thoughts of killing each other. Corrine’s father is dying, and they make the trek to the countryside not to be by the man’s side but to ensure they get a robust inheritance, even if this means killing other family members. Once they set off on the road, things get strange as there appear to be dangers and obstacles around every corner. The couple encounters absurdly violent car accidents and meets the bizarre characters who populate this region. Once their car is destroyed, they face class struggle moments out of history, including meeting with long-dead historical figures. Eventually, they fall into the clutches of hippie revolutionaries who steal from travelers and cannibalize them when they are starving. 

Week End was a response and declaration from Godard signaling his end with commercial filmmaking. The title card at the film’s end reads “Fin de cinema” (The End of Cinema). And for the next decade, the director only made militant political film pieces, often in an experimental vein. In this way, Week End is an ending and a beginning. The director was never one for holding close to traditional storytelling structures, and this movie is one of the most profound examples of that, with Godard’s signature title cards dominating more and more of the runtime. At the time, he was no longer doing press for his films, and Week End was missed by many people who otherwise would have rushed to the theater to see it. He didn’t comment much on the movie until 1978 when it was screened in Montreal as part of a lecture series. His thoughts were that he wanted to make a confused, mixed-up movie that reflected much of the internal anger he felt about the world and his chosen career.

From the opening frames of Week End to its horrific conclusion, it presents its worldview as one of bemused horror. Our protagonists seem like complete misanthropes, but so does everyone else. There’s no sense of empathy found among anyone. The most audacious display of this is a continuous eight-minute tracking shot following the couple as they drive parallel to a line of backed-up traffic, attempting to unfairly squeeze in ahead of where they should be. It’s both a sight gag and a visual rant, Godard laying out how the car is a machine of great destruction and evokes tremendous anger in the people using them. There’s a clash, though, as the colors in this film are very bold and bright, something we don’t associate with a bleak aesthetic. The majority are, in fact, red-white-blue, the colors of the French flag, very intentional. 

This is a film worthy of a long study. Godard’s references are abundant and single scenes could be unpacked across dozens of pages of criticism. The director has an understanding that this is his last moment speaking in this context and is trying to articulate everything he believes has not been made explicitly clear in his prolific catalog. A lot of care is put into the construction of Week End with set pieces that could not have been pulled off working in an improvisational style. There had to have been a lot of coordination and discussions about acquiring cars, setting up accidents so they looked precisely as Godard intended, and ensuring actors understood the historical figures they were embodying.

The overarching narrative becomes less important than the strange encounters our characters have. That initial introduction is crucial because it outlines how Godard sees the apathetic upper middle classes. They are selfish & petty, focused only on their momentary pleasure with no respect for those who do the labor to make societies function. In an early scene, Corrine tells her lover about an orgy she participated in, giving great detail about what happened. The camera slowly zooms in and out, giving the viewer a sense of disorientation. Her lover asks at the end if this is real or a dream, and Corrine confesses she doesn’t quite know. This helps contextualize the rest of the film and its increasingly weird moments. Is this a horrible dream or the reality of the world? It’s hard to tell.

Godard has our couple encounter garbage collectors, half African immigrants, and gives them direct-to-camera speeches quoting from activists/writers like Freidrich Engels, Franz Fanon, and Kwame Ture. The author Emily Bronte is found wandering along a forest path. The fictional character of Tom Thumb makes an appearance. Much of what happens in Week End recalls the surreal comedy of Luis Buñuel, where the film is more about playing with ideas than telling a linear story. 

All of Godard’s work is positioned to comment on the influence of film as a shaper of identity. In Week End, the cannibal hippies address each other with call signs that are movie titles (The Searchers, Johnny Guitar). That final act is a grotesque consumption where one spouse devours another with casual passivity. Everything that strikes us as horrific is simply a habit for these people. Everything is a hazy dream, so there’s never a feeling of consequence. Paired with Godard’s strong Marxist sentiments, we can see how the film comments on wilful blindness in the West to the suffering of the workers beneath us and ourselves.

This is the first in a two-week series I’m calling Angry Cinema, where I want to look at films made by people who were clearly furious about something. That anger is fuel to get the project done but also affects how the story is told. As with Week End, the other movies in this series bear some contempt for their audience, unwilling to let the story unfold pleasingly. You have to work to watch Week End. I like to think that work is worth it because the film has so much to say about things still crucial to our lives in the 21st century.