This film marked Godard's thirteenth collaboration with the French New Wave's most celebrated cinematographer, Raoul Coutard (both men would receive Honorary Academy Awards in the new millennium), and it continued their bold experimentation with color that had begun with the CinemaScope delicacy Contempt (1963) and reached delirious heights with the eyeball-searing Pierrot le Fou (1965). Studded with color-driven symbolism and allusions to literature, philosophy, and the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, the film ("narrative" seems like an insufficient word here) charts the hallucinatory journey of couple Corinne (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne) on a weekend trip out of the city for some quiet time in the countryside, which turns out to be just the opposite. The pair seems to be plotting to kill most of their family members as well as each other, but a thriller this most definitely is not. Revolutionaries, catastrophic car wrecks, and dead bodies are just a few of the obstacles faced by the characters and, by extension, the viewer, who is also confronted with diatribes about the evils of colonial exploitation (the most memorable delivered in true Godardian fashion over a lengthy scene of two men scarfing down sandwiches).
Boasting a sense of disgust for Western society that wouldn't be matched again until the early films of John Waters, Weekend still holds on to some semblance of a natural progression of scenes and ideas (something he largely abandoned for a few films after this) and features a pair of familiar faces at its heart - or at least faces that would become familiar to international audiences over the ensuing decade. Darc had enjoyed the more notable career to this point with significant roles in Roger Vadim's Please, Not Now! (1961) and Georges Lautner's The Great Spy Chase (1964), with this film marking one of four leading roles she enjoyed in French cinemas in 1967 (along with Lautner's Sorrel Flower and La grande sauterelle and Nicolas Gessner's The Blonde from Peking).
More of an unknown quantity at the time, Yanne had slowly worked his way up through bit roles before teaming up with director Claude Chabrol in Line of Demarcation (1966); the director would go on to provide Yanne with two of his finest roles in This Man Must Die (1969) and the astonishing Le Boucher (1970). He continued to work busily in French films until his death in 2003, with prestigious projects in his later years including Indochine (1992), The Horseman on the Roof (1995), and Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001).
Still jolting today for modern viewers who may not be aware of all of its cultural and political undertones, Weekend thankfully didn't prove to be the "end of cinema" promised in its final few seconds. Perhaps the best recent summation of it came from filmmaker Ben Wheatley of Free Fire (2016) and Kill List (2011) fame, who noted about his first viewing, "I almost felt like I'd had the stack of cards in my head rearranged and reprogrammed after watching that film. In so many moments in it--I didn't understand much of it, I probably still don't understand much of it--but what I did understand I really liked. Just the boldness of it, the jump cuts, that you could do whatever you wanted, that you could be silly but serious at the same time. And visually it didn't look like anything else I'd ever seen." You could say something similar about many Godard films, of course, but this particular example managed to drill into the public consciousness and, for discerning film fans, continues to refuse to leave.
By: Nathaniel Thompson
