Weekend
1967 ‘Week End’ Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Synopsis
A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.
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This film seems oddly fitting for me. Week End is a black comedy and features car crash after car crash on the side of the roads in bloody despair. I have a great fear of dying in a car crash, i've been in a bunch of car accidents before and as much as i dislike Monday mornings i'm not ready to get up and leave just yet. Albert Camus was afraid of dying in a car accident his entire life, and then died in a car crash whilst celebrating his Nobel prize win. How absurd. Just like this film. Absurd.
It's so free of conventions and storytelling mechanics that you can all but give up predicting where it's going and… -
72/100
For about an hour, Godard's greatest film, achieving a perfect balance between playful dialectics and formal bravado. Even the epigrams don't annoy me as much as usual, perhaps because they so annoy the protagonists (who just keep doggedly asking which way Oinville is, shouting louder and louder over the quotations). In the home stretch, however, watching it starts to resemble what I imagine it was like to see Andy Kaufman stand onstage reading The Great Gatsby aloud—admirable in principle, but tedious to actually endure for any length of time. There's a big difference between the astonishing traffic-jam sequence-shot, with its constant visual dynamism, and (to cite just one late example) an Algerian dude eating a sandwich for several minutes…
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Breakdown of social order in cars and on the roads: how extremely Ballardian. JGB must surely have seen this and over the few following years percolated Crash and Concrete Island. In one scene a man beats a car with a tree-branch; that's rather familiar too.
I agree with Mike D'Angelo's review that this is a film of two halves. The first just-over-an-hour, following a murderous bourgeois couple on a chaotic spree around rural roads in riotous summer heat, is grimly funny and so pacy it flies by, especially compared with of most of Godard's avant-garde political films of the period (Une femme mariée, 2 ou 3 choses, La Chinoise).
The rest of the film mixes political speeches with unpleasant scenes…
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I loved the first 50 something minutes of chaos and ridonkulousness but the second half drags on with heavy handed and boring monologues. SHOW DON'T TELL, BRO.
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Director - Jean-Luc Godard
Writer - Jean-Luc Godard
Cast - Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Paul Gégauff, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Blandine Jeanson, Yves Afonso, Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre KalfonIf I ever get a time machine, I’m going back in time and becoming a French revolutionary. It all looks like so much fun!
Ahem, anyway… Week End is classic Godard; it deals with the collapse of bourgeois society, it involves lots of in-jokes (Godard was meta before meta was meta…) and references to other films, it combines dark humour, violence and surrealism – sometimes in a single scene – and it is both simplistic and complex. It follows a married couple, Roland (Yanne) and Corinne (Darc), both of whom are having…
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December Project #14
Jean-Luc Godard's filmmaking techniques are as rebellious as the ideas he is exploring/expressing. Audacious and overwhelmingly provoking. Using extensive metaphors, literary and cinematic references to satire the conflicted state of French society. A bourgeoisie couple (played by TV stars Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne) embark on a road trip in order to secure an inheritance by any means necessary. Their road trip turns into an odyssey-esque journey where they meet a variety of unique characters as the world crumbles around them. Godard uses their journey as a way to show the couples immoral nature along with how upper class society reacts to various forms of intelligence and thinking. He structures the film in an erratic and unorganized…
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Hyper and at times witty. But it felt overly experimental, and occasionally like a political statement more than a film. Interesting visuals and satire, although some of it was so of the time, that it was lost on me.
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"There's no need to insult the tractor."
An Eastmancolor odyssey of the bourgeoisie. Godard's revolutionary rhetoric wins the war over the narrative here, which I guess is the point, although it results in some tedious passages, particularly in the final third. However, his magician's hat of cinematic technique remains second to none. The editing, tracking shots, title cards, music, and staging are as exhilarating as anything shot in the ensuing forty-five years.
Fin de cinema indeed.
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violent
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"I once said that a tracking shot was a moral choice, right?"
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Well, that was..... something.
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What a weird movie... I really enjoyed this madcap adventure from Godard. I'm not sure exactly what it was but it was hilarious, really dark, and generally a lot of fun.
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This film almost hates being a film. It throws all filmic conventions on their head. I was equally annoyed and fascinated. Annoyed by the sledgehammer politics, fascinated by the fragmented narrative. You have to admire Godard's vision. This is the most anti-film film I've ever seen. Bizarre and compelling.
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This movie's hilarious.
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Director - Jean-Luc Godard
Writer - Jean-Luc Godard
Cast - Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Paul Gégauff, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Blandine Jeanson, Yves Afonso, Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre KalfonIf I ever get a time machine, I’m going back in time and becoming a French revolutionary. It all looks like so much fun!
Ahem, anyway… Week End is classic Godard; it deals with the collapse of bourgeois society, it involves lots of in-jokes (Godard was meta before meta was meta…) and references to other films, it combines dark humour, violence and surrealism – sometimes in a single scene – and it is both simplistic and complex. It follows a married couple, Roland (Yanne) and Corinne (Darc), both of whom are having…