Week End

by Steven Boone

WEEK END is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film about a hateful bourgeois couple traveling through a rural stretch of France strewn with dead bodies and burning vehicles. Looks like the end of the world. It’s the tumultuous late '60s, but this particular doomsday feels strangely like a JACKASS stunt, or those smarmy thetruth.com anti-smoking commercials. With rape and cannibalism. WEEK END takes not taking itself seriously way too seriously.

I’ve always found Godard pretty tedious, even when he’s serving up airy souffles like BREATHLESS and BAND OF OUTSIDERS. He loves cinema, sure, but nowhere near as much as he hates the hypocrisy and self-delusion of the ruling classes worldwide. (Damn. He should have been a union organizer or a terrorist. Maybe he was at some point.) His lucid politics, his ideas about civilization versus barbarism, his idea of a joke (amateur Python), his solidarity with the oppressed, his pessimism about human connection... all these rueful observations he expresses in apocalyptic rants, gags, verbal riffs and visual non sequiturs that resurface later as damning correlatives to said riffs. But, for all the operatic tracking shots, he has little rhythm and no heart. If that’s your thing, eat up. In the dark of the theater, I prefer singers over scientists.

Godard’s brilliance and right-on radicalism don’t add up to an essential filmmaker. WEEK END plays the way I suspect the elaborate social provocations of Euro auteurs like Noe, Haneke, Ozon and von Trier will come off in the near future—like snotty tantrums. Storytelling, what’s that? Actually, all of these guys know how to tell a story, but they’re too smart(-ass) to bother most of the time. The film-of-ideas is just as tiring to me as the novel-of-ideas. Everything’s random access, nothing you need settle down to watch in the dark. Hang it in a gallery or lay it on the coffee table, but feel free to look away, drift and return the way you might if Godard himself were crowding you, dispensing his wisdom along with a tiny whiff of bourbon.

WEEK END messes around with title cards and jarring sound transitions in the manner of later films like FIRST NAME: CARMEN and EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF. While his mouthpiece characters resist all forms of hegemony in word and deed, his picture and sound follow suit, refusing to cooperate with Hollywood’s soothing formal dictates. An absurdly long, xxx-rated monologue about a sexual threesome accompanies the ultimate stylistic sin: The camera zooms in and out at random while an ominous music cue drops out intermittently, senselessly. Might as well be gonzo porn scraps. But as the backlit protagonist in her underwear drones out the story to her lover, the effect satisfies neither a porn nor cinema jones. It’s just Godard being rebellious, nerd-naughty.

Later, he orchestrates an even longer shot tracking an endless traffic jam out of the Old Testament. All kinds of surreal and gory events pass through the frame in “real” time. All I could think of was the amount of money and manpower it must have taken to pull this silly scene off. Maybe that’s what Godard wants us to think about.

A child of the Nazi occupation of France, Godard has admitted to being a cinematic resistance fighter down to his socks. WEEK END is what happens when a resistance fighter sprays the machine gun so indiscriminately he kills even the thing he is presumably fighting for—in this case, true cinematic poetry.

01967: 105 minutes: dir. by Jean-Luc Godard: written by Jean-Luc Godard