Apocalyptic Weekend
Eckstein, George
IN HIS LATEST FILM, Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard attacks the phenomenon of violence. He piles horror on horror—adds gore, callousness, perversion, brutality, all culminating in cannibalism. Not...
...with Emily Brontë whom they drench with gasoline and burn...
...He drenches us in gore, depravity, and callousness...
...Could it be—as Frederic Wertham maintains—that a film like Weekend contributes to the blunting of our sensibilities, helps to condition us to the very brutality against which Godard presumably wants to arouse us...
...The multi-million inheritance now within reach, they set out on their way back to Paris, hold up a group of picnickers for food and a car, and are in turn captured by a band of young Yippie-type guerrillas camped in the woods, Indian-fashion, with evocations of Walden Pond and Whitmanesque poetry...
...When they finally reach their destination Oinville (Pigtown...
...He piles horror on horror—adds gore, callousness, perversion, brutality, all culminating in cannibalism...
...They are dangerous heroes: Marquis de Sade, for whom Freedom equals Violence, and Frantz Fanon, for whom Violence equals Freedom—and both of them titillating a young intellectual elite in a society in which Violence comes more and more to equal Violence for To these are added some daring new devices, its own sake...
...from a group of wandering Italian movie actors...
...In his inventiveness, as in his ability to render pictorially the ludicrous and the barbaric aspects of our mores, Godard is unsurpassed...
...Not since Hieronymus Bosch and Goya have we been exposed to such ghastly pictorial visions...
...He is politically more sophisticated than Richard Lester, less melodramatic than Fellini, much more radical than Mike Nichols...
...At times his inventiveness runs away with him, and Weekend would gain by some judicious editing...
...borrowings from and allusions to other films and film-makers (Bergmann, Bunuel, Monsieur Verdoux, Bonnie and Clyde, Parapluiesde Cherbourg...
...Corinne and Roland, a chic young couple, spend the weekend driving to the village of her parents, in order to extort money from her dying father...
...WE ARE LEFT overwhelmed with Godard's visions of horror, projected through his customary cinematic devices to produce a Brechtian effect of detachment: • casualness in face of the monstrous (Corinne's "Gosh, I left my Hermes bag in the car," as she emerges from the flaming pyre of a multiple collision, corpses strewn about...
...several fairytale encounters of the wandering couple with historical and literary figures: with a Marquis de Sade philosophizing on "Liberty=Violence" and "the knife in the garage...
...Still, the question arises whether he does not in some way defeat his own purpose...
...They wander on, hitchhiking, asking NOTEBOOK their way from a large variety of people: from hostile strangers who subject them to juvenile game interrogations ("Would you rather sleep with Mao or Johnson...
...One wonders whether Godard, in trying to make his point, has not overdrawn his picture...
...from a hobo who rapes Corinne by the roadside while Roland, unperturbed, looks out for passing cars...
...lettered titles, often with terrible puns ("Analyse, Faux-tographe"), but sometimes with savage irony ("Faux Raccords"—Fatse Reunion— the heroine eating a stew containing pieces of her slain husband...
...Like the heroes of old, they undergo innumerable tribulations and encounter a variety of people, symbolic representatives of social forces and ideas: they drive past bloody wrecks, through pyres on the highways...
...from the colored crew of a garbage truck who subject them to humiliation and an endless Frantz Fanon speech...
...For Israel or Egypt...
...the asides to the audience ("What a shitty film, one meets only sick people...
...father is dead, mother won't part with the dough and is brutally killed, blood gushing into the street, over a skinned rabbit she had been carrying...
...As so often with Godard, the female of the species survives as the stronger one, in this case literally devouring the male, and presumably joining the wave of the future...
...Man inspires only horror in his fellow man...
...Film or Reality...
...are detoured by a Christlike hippie who forces them to expose their greed...
...the interminable tracking shot of a mile-long traffic jam, with its violent abuse and cacophony of horns, culminating in a bloody crash scene with piercing sirens and flashing ambulance lights...
...To these are added some daring new devices, long passages, not all of them fully successful, but all skilful: • the slow, muted, dimly backlit opening scene of the young heroine, almost nude, with hardly perceptible changes of position, exciting her husband with the whispered report on a sex orgy in which she served as a catalyst for a Lesbian friend and her impotent husband...
...There is a Che-ish leader, a jazz drummer, and a sadistic cook...
...from mythicalhistorical figures in fairytale encounters...
...the idyllic interlude of a gentle pianist playing Mozart in a barnyard to bored farmhands and bystanders (a satire of "culture to the people...
...As the chief symbol of this brutality Godard uses the automobile, the Moloch of our time...
...lose their car in a flaming collision...
...But where in his earlier film, Pierrot le Fou, the automobile served the hero and heroine in their quest for a meaningful life, in Weekend it reveals their greeed, brutality, and callousness...
...IN HIS LATEST FILM, Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard attacks the phenomenon of violence...
...By exaggerating beyond reality, it is true, he transposes the horrors to a symbolic plane and thus renders them bearable (although he lapses into unbearable reality when he makes us witness the actual slaughter of actual animals...
...In a final paroxysm of Bosch-like sadism, Roland is killed and cooked, and Corinne takes up with the guerrilla leader...
Vol. 16 • March 1969 • No. 2
