Week End (1967)

Week End is a French film comedy-drama first released in 1967, directed by Jean-Luc Godard.  The film stars Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valérie Lagrange and Jean-Pierre Léaud.  It has also been released under the title: Week-End.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


One weekend, a married couple, Corinne and Roland, set out to visit their parents, who live in the French countryside.  Corinne’s father is very old and she wants to ensure that she will inherit the bulk of his estate.  En route, the couple are involved in a car crash and have to continue their journey on foot.  Their countryside walk soon turns into a nightmare as they witness further road accidents and are taunted by eccentric philosophers, social crusaders, mad poets and Alice in Wonderland.  They finally reach the home of Corinne’s parents – but too late.  Her father has died and he has left everything to his wife.  Corinne has no choice but to kill her mother.  Not long after, Corinne and Richard fall into the hands of a band of Maoist hippies who have turned to cannibalism...

A film lost in the cosmos and A film found on the scrap-heap are the opening captions to what would be Jean-Luc Godard’s most virulent assault on contemporary French society.  An Odyssey in anarchy would be an equally fitting epithet, for what Godard paints is a deeply disturbing picture of a world that is in the process of disintegration as the forces of capitalism and socialist revolution lock horns and tear the established order apart.  The film is best remembered for its ten minute long sequence in which the camera tracks slowly along a seemingly interminable traffic jam in a country lane, whose peace is ruined by the unending blare of irate klaxons - a chilling visual metaphor for where our society may be heading.

Week End has been compared with Luis Buñuel’s Le Charme discrèt de la bourgeoisie.  Both films portray the middle classes as an enemy of society, a parasitic entity that lives off the blood and sweat of the working classes, making a great play of its moral and intellectual superiority whilst openly indulging in morally dubious and often stupidly self-destructive pastimes.   Godard’s approach, however, is far more political than merely satirical.  He sees the bourgeoisie not just as an object of ridicule, but as something that is a genuine danger to society, a boil that must be lanced if mankind is to have any hope of future happiness.

Compared with Godard’s previous films – Made in USA and La Chinoise – Week End has something resembling a plot, although this doesn’t necessarily mean that the film is any more accessible.  In some ways this is the most Brechtian of Godard’s middle-period films.  Any spectator of this film can never be a passive observer but must be actively engaged in interpreting what he or she sees, otherwise it becomes just a lifeless piece of abstract art.   Week End doesn’t even pretend to be a representation of reality and repeatedly states that it is only a film (just as you might say that that the Mona Lisa is only a painting).  

It was through Mireille Darc’s insistence that she would make a film with Jean-Luc Godard that the director was able to secure the comparatively large budget for Week-End.  Darc was under contract with a film production company and refused to make another film until she had appeared in a film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.  By hiring two well-known and talented actors in the shape of Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, Godard knew that his film would have mainstream appeal, which he and the film’s distributors were quick to capitalise on.  As a result, Week-End is the best known and most commercially successful of Godard’s political films, and some regard it as one of the most important films of the 1960s.  

Made in 1967, Week End would soon prove to be a highly prophetic film.  As the events of May 1968 were to show, our greed-based, winner takes all society is not as secure as we like to think and that beneath the thin veneer of civilisation lies a seething mass of discontent.  As De Gaulle found to his cost in the last year of his presidency, it takes very little to upend the apple cart and bring anarchy and uncertainty where order and stability once reigned, under the seemingly benign grip of capitalism.  Forty years on, with the failings of unrestrained capitalism exposed for all to see, Week End has an even greater resonance.

© James Travers 2008

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