Film review: Weekend (1967)

There was a Monty Python sketch that imagined Salad Days directed by Sam Peckinpah.  Well, this film is a little like It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World directed by Peckinpah.  With a little bit of The Hills Have Eyes thrown in.  Oh, and a scene that takes the scene in Persona (from 1966) where a woman recounts the explicit details of an orgy (explaining to those of us who don't remember the sixties how Swedish films acquired their reputation) and tries to outdo it in all respects (you might have thought that "eating ass" was a millennial invention.  Also eggs and milk are involved.). Oh and a joke where a woman thinks she is warming her hands on her lover's penis but it turns out it's a giant turd. Weekend is directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and if you ever wondered if Godard's reputation as an exasperating provocateur was fair, well this one should settle it for you.  The basic plot is a bickering bourgeois couple making its way across the French countryside to get to her parent's so they can ensure that they are the beneficiaries of the will of her father.  Meanwhile, we are aware that they both secretly loathe the other, have lovers and have been secretly poisoning each other.  Or at least, I think so - it's very confusing.  Another film that comes to mind is Man Bites Dog (1992) which is a very dark comedy about a documentary crew following around a serial killer.  Like that film, Weekend has some laugh-out-loud moments of violence (mostly, in this case, scenes of road rage - Weekend features more car wrecks than Death Race 2000), but both films become very dark, almost as if to say "oh yeah?  You think that's funny?  Well what about this?"  Both films feature rapes (in Weekend it occurs demurely off-camera, although you hear the victim, in this case the wife, shouting "help!") but Godard's film also has actual animal slaughter, complete with gushing blood and much thrashing.  So be forewarned.  Weekend is most famous for an incredibly long tracking shot of a traffic jam, which is honestly amazing (you can watch it here, and then you don't have to watch the rest of the film), and when you reach the cause of the jam, you discover that it is a bloody wreck where two families, whose blood-soaked corpses are now laid out on the verge, were wiped out.  Our couple (who began their journey with one of the funny scenes of violence, involving kicking an obnoxious brat and squirting his mother with oil, and then squealing off as his father shoots at them with a shotgun) just drive by at speed, unconcerned.  That more-or-less sums them up.  At one point they set fire to a woman because she annoys them, and when they get to the parents' house and discover that the will has been changed, they try half-heartedly to convince the mother to cut them back in before giving up and simply bludgeoning and stabbing her to death.  But they get theirs (or the husband (who is played by the titular Le Boucher - a far superior, and far less arty film) does) when they are captured by a band of wood-dwelling cannibalistic terrorists.  The film ends with the wife, who has gone over to the terrorists, chowing down on a big chunk of... her husband.  There's a message in that.  So yes, it's an overtly political film, and the Six Days War comes up a lot, as does Colonialism (speeches against which are delivered by an African immigrant and a self-described Arab, although, this being Godard, he puts his camera on the wrong one while off-screen the other delivers the speech he should be giving) but it's hard to feel that there is any real message other than nihilism.  The terrorists are as bad as the bourgeois, and are involved in petty self-defeating squabbles with rival bands (along with drumming on a kit set up in the middle of the woods, and inserting all kinds of foodstuffs (eggs again, and let's just say they might've given Led Zeppelin ideas) in the vagina of a captured girl).  The conveyed impression that the picturesque small-town France of the sixties was a decadent cesspool of corruption seems rather quaint.  And the sexual politics are squeam-inducing.  But I'll give it this: there are some scenes that will stay with me even if they are untethered from plot or sanity.  (I didn't even mention the hitchhiker who claims to be God and who can actually work miracles, or the motorist (played by the actor who plays Antoine Doinel in a slew of Truffaut movies) who communicates over the phone in rhyming song.  In fact, it's better if I don't.)  So you certainly should watch the traffic jam scene.  But don't feel you have to go further.  (I think I'm done with Godard.  I loved Breathless as a teen, was a bit disappointed by Band A Part recently, and found Alphaville stylish but dull (and similarly retrograde) even more recently.  Should've just stuck with Breathless.)