Weekend

If you think Peter Greenaway was treading new ground with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Jean-Luc Godard had done it all 20 years earlier in Weekend, and got himself banned in the process for political and sexual subversion.

For Godard in 1967, kinky sex, cannibalism, and stupidly violent car crashes were the order of the day, though for a balanced diet, he was anxious you should also sit through lengthy political monologues (and was proved right-on when the May-68 uprisings happened). With a few long tracking shots lasting 10 minutes or more thrown in, such as the now infamous one along a traffic queue in the country, or the one around a farmyard where a concert pianist is practising at a grand piano (just to make us ask ourselves what we're doing watching), it all makes a recipe for a reassuringly unhappy censor.

It's obviously all a very clever satirical critique on the petit bourgeoisie, and don't worry, if you think the car crashes are really obviously fake, it's alright, that's probably the point. Godard wouldn't want us to forget we're watching a film!

Godard's main actors Jean Yanne & Mireille Darc both put their heads on the block for this one as they were both big names in French cinema at the time. The best moments in the film are the little asides they make - such as Jean Yanne's exasperated moan that he's getting fed up with this stupid film. As a road movie, one wonders what sort of trip Roland and Carine are on when they meet Tom Thumb and Emily Brontë - and then decide to set fire to them since they can't be real - remember; this is the sixties.

Review by Philip Kelley
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95