As someone who has experienced the likes of French cinema time and time again, I thought myself to have a sound understanding of what the genre has to offer. A Godard film here and there, some Bresson, a bit of Demy, they all seem to fit into a sort of mold. However, unbeknownst to me, these pictures were only scratching the surface. This grand idea became apparent as I gazed soulfully at the beautiful, horrible, unreplicable mosaic that is Jean Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967).
I had to compose this essay as soon as possible, while the film’s contents still take refuge in facets of my mind. I desired to write about Weekend because without something on the page, my opinion will be blurred, even to myself. The bones of the story are simple, elementary almost: A wealthy couple embarks on a holiday in order to visit the woman’s ailing father. Not necessarily a horrid plot on its own but the details are what set this film apart from anything I have ever seen. To begin, these people are horrible. The man and woman are constantly bickering, cheating, separating, and so forth. Godard writes possibly two of the most unlikeable leads you can have, but there’s a point in that. The underlying goal of the two is not to come to the old man’s aid, but to strip him of his wealth in the form of inheritance. Whether that means they have to wait for his death or kill him, they don’t care.
This all seems fine, a fairly straight-forward plot in its essence, but its tightly woven web progressively comes undone as odd characters spout avant-garde nonsense at our leads, who are just as confused as we are, even breaking the fourth wall and calling such tropes “idiotic”. From this point on the film almost completely loses its shape, the couple’s car breaks down and they walk the highway, seeing more and more smashed cars with soulless corpses inhabiting their ruins. The two hitchhike around, never seeming to cover any ground, and the situations, and characters they come across become progressively more unhinged. I thought that I’d be able to make sense of this film by writing about it but it’s only made it more confusing. At first glance, you would think the choices made by Godard were utterly random, yet there’s a sort of uniformity to it all. The scene that gave me the slightest gleam of light as to what the point of this all was, came at the end of the film. The couple has just gotten picked up by a garbage truck and stopped to have lunch, here, the two men running the truck speak to the camera about discrimination, corruption, and other prying matters, all while chewing big sandwiches. This scene allowed me to discern Godard’s purpose in creating Weekend was to mock surrealist cinema – a medium that had been milked dry in the 1960s – while also implementing legitimate philosophies and ideas. Such a film could never be made today, and perhaps that’s what makes it so impressive, that Godard, someone hounded for being pretentious, was able to poke fun at his own style of movie, while also creating something meaningful in its own right.
The Blue Lotus 