Finally, it's the Weekend. No, not the literal one.

Godard. 1967. Weekend.
Everything led up to this. A culmination, an encapsulation of an aesthetic, a singular talent, an idea, perhaps an idea that was the entirety of a person.
Weekend is not a film. It's much more. Treatise, work of art, self-portrait, screed, bore, declaration, and semi-coherent narrative; these are proper, but not entire. It's visual poetry, arresting and savage critique of every sacred cow of consumer and mass culture. It's the big crunch of shopping malls, the heat death of the factory lines, a mushroom cloud to punctuate Godard's political era.
Weekend contains more content, more ideas, more art than most ten films put together. It's scattershot and bizarre, true, but when it works, it sets fire to the intellectual mind.
As an absurdist film, it lacks in terms of plot, but shines in its setup and execution of thoroughly skewed scenes. The whole mad journey plays out in stops and starts, dragging its feet through intentionally annoying conceptual gags and then hurtling headfirst into a morass of philosophical and historical exposition. Hardly any of the film could be considered easy to watch; whether it's assaulting the viewer with a deviant sexual liason, annoying them with overly long shots and too-loud car horns, or lambasting them for their political apathy, Weekend is a film that does its best to try the patience of its audience. It is all for the best, though, as its techniques force the viewer to confront the film on its own terms. Weekend forcibly restrains any who see it from turning their mind off and just enjoying a simple film. It demands attention, its impish gags and heady philosophical ramblings commanding an uncommon force that I imagine most other 'provacateur' movies simply could not muster.
Our crazed journey begins with one of many pop-art styled intertitles, proclaiming that this is a film 'lost in the cosmos'. In a bourgeois apartment, some light conversation about death. Our materialistic main characters, Corinne and Roland, are making a trip to Oinville to make sure they get their inheritance- the hard way. A fight breaks out in the parking lot below, and our detestable lead bitch remarks that it would be wonderful if someone had died in the altercation. A bizarre conversation follows, with the foreboding score floating into and out of the scene, becoming more obtrusive and annoying, then retreating, as Corinne recounts, in graphic detail, an evening of depraved menage a trois. When asked if the story is true, or a nightmare, she says simply, "I don't know". After bashing in someone else's bumper on the way out, a brief, highly class-related struggle follows. Corinne and Roland, after a little absurdist argument, are on their way. The most famous gag of the movie stops them dead in their tracks; a sprawling traffic jam on a narrow country road that takes up an entire five minute sequence, soundtracked by hellish cacophonies of car horns and yells, and the score once again ominously looms upon the entrance of a Shell gasoline truck. At the very end, a disastrous accident has killed multiple people, but between the start and end of the jam, all manner of ridiculous activities are taking place. Chess games on the roadside, children frolicking, balls tossed between cars, and impossible collisions are everywhere. It's a thoroughly testing scene, but also entertaining in its silliness. It is perhaps one of the best encapsulations of the Weekend style, save perhaps the political screeds that take place later on.
As Roland and Corinne continue into the nearest town, a tractor collides with an expensive sports car. The driver of the car is killed, and his girlfriend verbally eviscerates the man in the tractor. As epithets rife with snobbery and class warfare pile up, the farmer and bourgeois woman try to drag Corinne and Roland into the argument over who had the right of way, and, finding no help, both the girl and the farmer unite in their hatred of our anti-heroes, showering them with racial slurs. As Roland speeds off, our bourgeois bitch and lumbering working class fool stand shoulder to shoulder, arms around each other, grieving the loss of their right to judge.
Our couple then have a short discussion that reveals their attitudes towards other human beings. Contemplating the farmer's claim, "We're all brothers, as Marx said", Roland asserts that "another communist said it. Jesus said it." Corinne replies, "I don't care, even if it's true. These aren't the Middle Ages." Apparently, both feel that modern society has entirely progressed past brotherhood and unity, and that the dawn of modern capitalism should require every man to act in his own self-interest.
The rat race of capitalism is the subject of our theater of the absurd, and Godard skewers it with gusto. Automobiles, as metaphors for modern industrial capitalist societies, are wrecked ubiquitously on every stretch of road. Over and over, the message hits home: modern societies are an insult to human decency, where we value only possessions; where boredom and drudgery are our lives, where sex is a farce and a distraction from ennui, where the working classes are manipulated, and the rich gorge themselves on the carcasses of wrecked lives, leaving only husks. Prescient, non?
The title of my blog comes from the next scene, where Roland and Corinne are carjacked by a madman, armed with a gun, and his accomplice. The madman rambles on, mixing comic pronouncements with bizarrely perceptive mots justes. He asks Corinne her name, then refuses her answers. "Durant is your husband's name. Dupont is your father's name", eventually announcing, "See? You don't even know who you are. Christianity: the death of language, the denial of self-knowledge." Here, he's taking to task the patriarchal nature of religions and societies that both make women subservient and impress upon them the names of their husbands. The director basically self-inserts his own opinions regarding film here, and announces "I'm here to inform Modern Times of the Grammatical era's end, and the beginning of Flamboyance, especially in cinema." Godard boldly states that his film endeavors to signify the beginning of a renaissance of films that are unafraid of absurdity and pass by the merit of their ideas, not their formal structure and rigid lockstep with reality. If we had been lucky, more films would be have taken up this clarion call. Or, perhaps it is best that they didn't, and Weekend remains a singular experience.
After running some other drivers off the road, Roland wrecks his car, in one of the many audio-visual mismatches that serve to highlight the unreality of the film. First, the image of the crash and a scream from Corinne, then a cut back to the preceding moment of tranquil driving, then the crash again. Corinne comically mourns the loss of her handbag, a really nifty one from Hermes. Godard hits hard once more with his brutal critique of consumerism.
The film also contains several scenes of concentrated political commentary, one featuring a man dressed as Napoleon shouting seeming platitudes (which, in actuality, are rather stinging barbs striking at humanity's greatest follies), another featuring a juxtaposition of two political manifestos laid out by off screen characters while the onscreen characters stare and eat a sandwich. The effect of having two men spell out each other's views with perfect mental clarity is a very interesting technique and manages to make these sorts of scenes rather arresting in their unique setup.
Corinne and Roland have a number of meta-referential lines in the movie pertaining to 'fictional' characters within the film. They even set fire to Tom Thumb and Emily Bronte simply because they won't tell them the way to Oinville. However, they do take time to note that they're only fictional characters. When hitching a ride, they ask if the driver is in the real world, or a film. This perfectly compliments the film's aesthetic choice to embrace the absurd and refuse to tell a mundane and hyper-real story, instead presenting a gaudy theater of brilliant and provocative ideas.
In the end, Corinne and Roland kill Corinne's mother for a handsome inheritance, but become hostages of cannibal revolutionaries. As these hippy dippy beat poets-cum-Gaullist gourmands compose odes to the ocean and feast on the dead, the film closes with Corinne having a bit of long pork, and hears that she is eating Roland. Remarking upon its good taste, she decides to have more later. The audacious closing text still rings true- "FIN DU CINEMA", not just the end of this film, but all film.
Godard's hellish vision remains prescient in its political observations, staying mordantly hilarious and farcical even upon repeat viewings. It is a quite obnoxious film at times thanks to its attempts to distance its audience from its own internal reality, but it only does so to force viewers to contemplate its ideas seriously. It truly is the end of all cinema; after seeing it, no other movie will ever seem quite so fiercely intelligent, so belligerent, brilliant, or morbidly funny. I wouldn't have it any other way.