Weekend

This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society reverting to savagery, and— according to the credits—the end of cinema itself.

Weekend (French: Week-end) is a 1967 black comedy[1][2] film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, both of whom were mainstream French TV stars. Jean-Pierre Léaud, iconic comic star of numerous French New Wave films including Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups (The Four Hundred Blows) and Godard’s earlier Masculin Féminin, appeared in two roles. Raoul Coutard served as cinematographer; Weekend would be his last collaboration with Godard for over a decade.

Quick Facts: Directed by, Screenplay by …
The film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival in 1968.[3][4]

Plot
Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) are a bourgeois couple. Each has a secret lover and conspires to murder the other. They drive out to Corinne’s parents’ home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, resolving to resort to murder if necessary.

The trip becomes a chaotically picaresque journey through a French countryside populated by bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own Facel-Vega is destroyed in a collision, they wander through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history, such as Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Emily Brontë (Blandine Jeanson).

When Corinne and Roland eventually arrive at her parents’ place, they discover that her father has died and her mother refuses to give them a share of the spoils. They kill her and hit the road again, only to fall into the hands of a group of hippie revolutionaries (calling themselves the Seine and Oise Liberation Front) that support themselves through theft and cannibalism. Killed during an escape attempt, Roland is chopped up and cooked.

Cast
Mireille Darc as Corinne
Jean Yanne as Roland
Paul Gégauff as Pianist
Jean-Pierre Léaud as Saint-Just
Blandine Jeanson as Emily Brontë
Yves Afonso as Tom Thumb
Juliet Berto as The Radical
Background
According to a letter from the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar to his translator Suzanne Jill Levine, the indirect inspiration for the movie was Cortázar’s short story ”The Southern Thruway.” Cortázar explained that while a British producer was considering filming his story, a third party presented the idea to Godard, who was unaware of its source. Because he had had no input on the making of the film, Cortázar vetoed the suggestion to translate the story’s title as ”Week-End” to take advantage of the tie-in.[5]

Themes and style
Weekend has been compared to Alice in Wonderland, the James Bond series, and the works of Marquis de Sade.[6][7] Tim Brayton described it as a ”film that reads itself, tells the viewer what that reading should be, and at the same time tells the viewer that this reading is inaccurate and should be ignored.”[8]

1967

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