Weekend (1967)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
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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What critics compared Weekend to
A traffic jam is usually not a good thing at the beginning of a movie - think of Godard's Weekend or 8 ½ or Falling Down - but here it is the opportunity for a truly thrilling song and dance routine on a four lane overpass.
Any thoughts that this could be related to Jean-Luc Godard’s famous traffic jam from his absurdist Weekend are immediately dispelled when a young, beautiful female driver begins singing “Another Day of Sun.”
The feeling of gridlock dread is overpowering, akin to Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave classic, “Weekend” (1967), but as we settle in through the car window of one calm young woman in a sheer yellow dress, she begins to sing a wistful song in a soft, low key.
Kicking memories of similar tailbacks in Godard’s Weekend and Fellini’s 8 ½ aside, the drivers leap from their cars and sing along to the ironically exuberant Another Day of Sun .
Here, Kubrick hands her two scenes that are arguably the film's strongest -- a pair of erotic monologues, one recounting a long-standing obsession with a stranger and another describing a dream in hushed, ashamed tones, that recall the similar centerpieces of Bergman's Persona and Godard's Weekend.
Godard includes moments of political discourse, as well as references to his favourite films – Gösta Berling (1924), Johnny Guitar (1954), The Searchers (1956) – and quips about the relation of art to to reality, but his main goal was to make his arrogant cruel bourgeois couple literally go through hell.
And the Liberation Front that kidnaps our heroes uses movie titles as code names in their radio transmissions: The Searchers, Battleship Potemkin, and Johnny Guitar, all Godard favorites from his movie critic days.
An ideal adaptation of Ballard's novel might look something like Crash, Fight Club and Delicatessen crossed with Godard’s Weekend.
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And second, that in the decade from the late 1960s through the mid-'70s, filmmakers often hatched extreme, unique, original visions — among them Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Dusan Makavejev's W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Werner Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God and, we might say, Gerard Damiano's art-porno Devil in Miss Jones.
Imagine the angels from Wings of Desire investigating the highway pile-up from Godard's Weekend -- that's the paranormal mood at this crash scene.
Long before David Cronenberg's Crash there was the longest automotive pile-up in history in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend , as the audience witnessed a petite bourgeois couple's reactions to an entropic universe descending into anarchism.
They’re among the most creative, colorful on-screen deaths in recent memory, with an ardent misanthropy which conjures from the belligerent arthouse provocations of Lars von Trier (“Dogville”) or Jean-Luc Godard (“Weekend”).
It certainly belongs to the modern tradition exemplified by Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" and Bertrand Bliter's "Going Places."
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…film about Greece, made by an expatriate Greek director, but featuring an all-star French-speaking cast, “Z” is, alongside John Frankenheimer's “The Manchurian Candidate” and Jean-Luc Godard's “Weekend,” one of the most important political films of all time.
Otherwise, at times the viewing experience could be quite frustrating, even maddening.Godard shotwith the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard ( Shoot the Piano Player Z ).