Week End

Week End, released in 1967, is a satirical French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the leading figures of the French New Wave movement—a cinematic era defined by its rejection of traditional filmmaking conventions and its embrace of experimental narrative structures, visual styles, and political themes. The film stars Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, and Jean-Pierre Kalfon in a story that deconstructs middle-class values and civilizational decay through a chaotic and absurdist road trip narrative that serves as an allegory for the social and political turmoil of 1960s France.

The story follows a fairly simple premise at first glance. Corinne (played by Mireille Darc) and Roland (played by Jean Yanne) are an affluent and self-absorbed Parisian couple who decide to embark on a weekend trip to the countryside. They intend to visit Corinne's dying father, with the hope of securing her inheritance. Right from the start, it is clear that the couple harbors no real affection for the patriarch but is motivated purely by greed.

But as they set out on their journey, Week End quickly sheds any semblance of being a straightforward narrative. Instead, Godard uses the trip as a backdrop to examine the disintegration of societal order and the collapse of bourgeois values. The couple encounters a series of increasingly bizarre and violent incidents along the way, which reflect the growing unrest and revolution simmering beneath the surface of France's seemingly polished society—a nod to the activist atmosphere leading up to the May 1968 protests.

Throughout their odyssey, Corinne and Roland engage in various philosophical dialogues, often breaking the fourth wall—a technique Godard employs to confront the audience directly with challenging ideas. These conversations are interwoven with scenes of absurdist humor, surreal set-pieces, and unexpected character interactions. The protagonists themselves are not sympathetically portrayed but are representative of the self-indulgent, amorality of the upper-middle class, their superficiality accentuated by the lens of the camera.

One of the most iconic sequences in the film is a prolonged traffic jam on a country road, filled with a cacophony of honking horns and a grim tableau of accidents and altercations. This traffic jam becomes a metaphor for the stagnation and gridlock within French society at large. Godard meticulously crafts this scenario to symbolize the tensions boiling over, suggesting that the utter breakdown of societal norms is not only possible but imminent.

Week End embraces a non-linear storytelling technique and freely plays with temporal discontinuity. The film is interspersed with intertitles declaring the days of the week, mockingly presenting the narrative's progression, although time seems disjointed and chaotic throughout the couple's journey. The film's sporadic shifts between color and monochromatic footage further add to the disorienting experience, blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, and challenging viewers' perceptions and expectations.

The cinematography by Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Godard, is both striking and innovative, using unconventional camera angles, abrupt zooms, and long tracking shots that were revolutionary at the time. These techniques subvert traditional filmmaking norms, and together with a disjointed editing style, they bring an urgent and chaotic energy to the motion picture.

The eclectic soundtrack of Week End accompanies the visual anarchy, interchanging between classical scores and contemporary sounds, seamlessly fitted into the narrative to accentuate the film's disruptive mood.

Thematically rich and stylistically avant-garde, Week End is replete with historical, literary, and political allusions. Among the sundry characters the couple meets are figures who represent various historical and cultural references, such as Emily Brontë, Tom Thumb, and Louis XVI. These encounters serve to create a tapestry of cultural commentary, as the film traverses the realms of art, politics, and history with an almost anarchic irreverence.

Godard's Week End is ultimately a complex, multi-layered critique of capitalism, Western civilization, and the middle-class lifestyle. The narrative spirals towards an apocalyptic crescendo, leaving the audience to grapple with the implications of the societal critique played out on screen.

As a piece of radical cinema, Week End is both a product of and a reaction to its times—a cinematic manifesto that defied genre, eschewed traditional narrative structures, and sought to provoke its audience into consciousness. It is experimental, confrontational, and remains a landmark film for scholars, cinephiles, and those interested in the juncture where cinema meets socio-political commentary.