In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard made a film called "Weekend." It seemed to anticipate the student demonstrations that would begin in May 1968, launching social disruption that would spread across France as labor unions launched strikes in sympathy. Before the story begins, Godard conveys uncertainty about how seriously we should take his film, with captions noting on the one hand that this is a film "adrift in the cosmos" and a bit later that the film was "found in a dump."
Meeting Godard's protagonists doesn't give us much better grounding. Early on, we see Corinne (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne), a married couple, plotting with their respective lovers to do each other in after seizing the assets of Corinne's ailing father; their plans for the old guy are not wholesome. These are not people with whom we will identify as we follow their plot and the subplots that lurch into view around them...
These subplots soon include an explosion of road rage in the parking lot below their Paris apartment, when drivers of a blue Mini and a red Matra 530 get into a fight over a fender-bender. Godard seems on top of automotive fashion in the French middle class; the Mini was a chic city car and the mid-engined Matra represented the latest automotive trends in 1967...
Unlike Roland's 1960 Facel Vega Facellia cabriolet, a car with an engine so trouble-prone that it bankrupted the company. Godard seems to be spoofing the pretensions of his characters (and their class) with this pretty but fickle car. When a small boy accosts Roland for backing into his mom's Renault, he teases the man for driving "a crap Facel." Their argument escalates, of course, and soon the boy's mom comes out to remonstrate (above). Then Roland attacks her car with a paint gun while the boy's dad shows up with a real gun (below) and fires warning shots. This conflict is presented as farce, not far from the tone of American situation comedies.
This tongue-in-cheek tone continues when Roland and Corinne finally make it onto the road, only to confront an epic traffic jam filmed in one long take over nearly a mile. In droll scenes reminsicent of the animated British film Automania 2000* from 4 years earlier, most motorists seem resigned to their fate. Roland ignores the rules of the two-lane road, making his own lane as he tries without success to cut in line. Meanwhile, stranded motorists play card games as the minutes pile up into hours...
Others play chess, seemingly oblivious to evidence of other kinds of pile-ups.
Still others pass soccer balls to pass the time.
While patient, imperturbable workhorses do what horses must do...
Images of caged monkeys, a caged llama, and caged lions may be Godard's deadpan way of asking who is really trapped here, and why...
Meanwhile, Roland and Corinne are getting nowhere...
…along with everyone else, whether they've stayed in their lane or not.
Below, our protagonists attempt to slip their Facellia behind a red late-Fifties Panhard Dyna Cabriolet Grand Standing (almost a movie title in itself) while a Renault Dauphine hugs a tree.
Godard shows us more abandoned roadside wrecks being towed away, yet we see no evidence of anyone coming to the aid of victims laid out along the roadside. The tone is morbidly satirical, and maybe a reminder that the term "black humor" was invented by French critics to describe stories by Jonathan Swift. The humor works because it's based on exaggeration of things we could see in society and out on the road in 1967, and the traffic jam gives Godard a way to show how people use their cars as projections of themselves, as well as symbolizing materialism.
This traffic jam occupies around a fifth of the film's running time, and while it's a car spotter's dream, it's a nightmare for humanists. Godard offers title cards announcing episodes, and "The Class Struggle" begins when Roland and Corinne, having just escaped the traffic jam, witness a collision between a Triumph and a farm tractor. In a sharp and witty argument, the privileged passenger of the roadster (her boyfriend having expired at the wheel) and the farmer exchange insults that expose their prejudices. This accident scene, like the others, is notable for the liberal splattering of ketchup on the victims, which is ironic because the French normally disdain using that condiment anywhere else...
Roland and Corinne decline to wait for the police to bear witness to the accident, instead driving on in the rain toward the country house of her parents. They stop to pick up a female hitchhiker, only to be carjacked by the woman's gun-toting boyfriend, who's been hiding behind a wreck. He informs them that he's here to launch the flamboyant era of film-making, and proves he's a magician by prompting Corinne to pull a rabbit from the glovebox. This isn't the first or last time Godard reminds us we're watching a film...
After escaping the carjackers, Roland and Corinne encounter Emily Bronte and Tom Thumb, and Roland wonders why they are trapped in a film with crazy people. Emily Bronte delivers a poetic speech about the cosmos.
The protagonists run a cyclist off the road, and then crash their Facel into a multi-car pileup; showing the car used as an actual weapon is another way of satirizing "normal" aggression behind the wheel. Now Roland and Corinne are on foot, still fixated on reaching that country house, and we are reminded that one title that Godard considered for "Weekend" was "The Odyssey".
Roland and Corinne escape on foot from more flaming catastrophes after some failed efforts at getting help, eventually hitching a ride with piano movers...
After a grand piano is unloaded at a working farm, Godard treats us to Mozart's Piano Sonata No.18 in D Major, and the pianist delivers a lecture on the harmonic virtues of Mozart, noting echoes in modern pop (he mentions the Beatles), decrying modern "serious" music, to which he claims nobody listens...
For a moment it seems we are, for the first time in this film, in real civilization, and Godard lets us linger there for awhile. He shows us a farm family and workers enthralled by the music, and his camera makes a couple of slow 360-degree circles around the farmyard, pondering the simple geometry and workmanlike order of the buildings and farm machines.
Maybe this is a comment on the value of art, and maybe it's here to remind us how order and harmony look and sound.
Our protagonists are still determined to get to that country house. While attempting to thumb a ride, they are rejected by motorists after they fail a quiz: Do they prefer Mao or Johnson? Are they in a film? A crew on a garbage truck picks them up, and then delivers a lecture on colonialism and capitalism. These scenes don't work as well as the epic traffic jam or the piano session, perhaps because the humor of exaggeration doesn't apply. Roland and Corinne eventually get to her father's country house to discover that he has died, and contend with her mother over his fortune. This episode doesn't end well, but by this point in the film we expect nothing will...
"Weekend" begins with an epic traffic jam, but it ends with something that looks a whole lot like the collapse of civilization. The easy satire of exaggerating human aggression and greed gives way to scenes of armed revolutionaries invading a picnic, taking hostages including Roland and Corinne, slaughtering farm animals, killing Roland, and indulging in cannibalism (well, it appears to be a piece of chicken; this is not a film for vegans). Several critics thought this was a masterwork back in 1968. Today this approach to satire no longer works; showing motorists engaged in armed conflict after a fender-bender wouldn't be such a case of exaggeration now. In an era of mass shootings in supermarkets and schools, Godard's 1967 vision of armed assault on innocent bystanders is showing us what we already know. "Weekend", like the society it depicts, falls apart at the end. We can look at it and say, "We've seen this movie before."
*Footnote: We took a look at Godard's first film, a groundbreaker that also featured a lot of cars (mostly stolen), in December 27, 2020, with "Stolen Cars and Stolen Kisses in Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless'." A review of the British animated film "Automania 2000" which in 1963 predicted traffic jams lasting years (along with the collapse of civilization) was posted here along with a review of the museum catalog for MoMA's current Automania exhibit on October 12, 2021. And classic cars featured in classic thrillers are pictured in "Speeding Into Darkness: The Cars of Film Noir", posted March 21, 2020.
Photo Credits: All images are from "Weekend", copyright 1967 by Films Copernic.
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