Weekend

After completing Weekend, Jean Luc Godard would enter what historians and theorists term his post "'68 Marxist period," a near decade of rejecting studio distribution and funding to create extraordinary leftist films meant not for theatrical release so much as activist purposes. Godard's rejection of narrative filmmaking becomes more significant in contextualizing Weekend within these temporal borders; the former tongue in cheek references to cinema, as well as the impetuous genre swapping in films such as Band of Outsiders and A Woman is a Woman are left behind for what still stands as an extremely angry, conjectural, and detached film.

Weekend loosely follows a bourgeois couple already in the process of murdering the wife's father for a large inheritance, while each plans to double cross the other after his death for the money. Embarking on a weekend drive to the father's house, the couple are deterred time and again with traffic jams, gun-toting anarchists, and imaginary literary characters. The preceding sentences do not in any way give a clear idea of the tone or implications of the film, which attacks capitalism, US influence in France, racism, patriarchy, class issues and the automobile in full force.

In clear homage to both pop art and director Luis Bunel, Godard paints his film in striking primary colors, specifically the blue, white, and red of both the French and American flags, lending a surrealist tone to the film that is only enhanced through the characters that the couple, Corinne and Roland, encounter on their journey into the French countryside.

Godard's burgeoning steps toward his fully focused political period are most clear in the last third of the film; first in a sequence involving two sanitary workers (one of African descent, the other Arabic), who speak the other's political thoughts while the silent party faces the camera and secondly in the extreme distance Godard places between his characters and the audience by the end of the film. In this final sequence, a 180 degree turn from the film's opening, we are witness to a group of guerrilla revolutionary students violently reacting to capitalism and the bourgeois class with behavior ranging from murder to cannibalism.

However, there is little sympathy from Godard as the students' activities are clearly as revolting as those of the privileged class. The disastrous effect of all parties concerned is embedded in relentless visual reference to car crashes in the film, with burning automobiles and vibrantly red bodies that litter the ground in increasing number.

Considering the amount of historical background and cultural references that help unravel this film, the commentary (by critic David Sterritt) is the most beneficial extra on the DVD, as well as an engaging listen. Perspectives of the film are also offered through an interview with the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard, as well as an interview with director Mike Figgis. More standard extras include the theatrical trailer and biographies of Godard, Coutard, Mike Figgis and cinema academic Colin MacCabe, who interviews Coutard.

While Weekend certainly remains one of Godard's most acidic films, it is also one of his most defining. -- Jenny Jediny