Weekend is a 1967 film by Jean-Luc Godard.
Roland and Corinne are an awful, awful bourgeois married couple. Each are carrying on affairs. Each in fact is planning on murdering the other. Neither can pull the trigger yet, though, as they've been slowly poisoning Corinne's multimillionaire father, and they have to get the inheritance first. Having heard that Corrine's father is at death's door, they leave Paris and go off to see him in the countryside.
The above description doesn't really do justice to the craziness of Weekend, which has stuff like Marxism lectures, a weirdo who sings when he makes telephone calls, Emily Brontë wandering about the woods babbling nonsense, more car wrecks than one would expect to see outside of a war zone, dead bodies lying all over the place, and last but not least, hippie cannibals.
Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Saint-Just
, the radical from The French Revolution, who is strolling through a meadow in 1967 reading from his own works, because this is that kind of movie. He also appears as the weirdo who sings on the phone.
Not to be confused for Weekend, a 2011 gay romantic drama.
Tropes
- Author Filibuster: The characters sometimes address the viewer and update him on the exploitation of the colonies by the first world.
- Big Honking Traffic Jam: Early in the film, as Roland and Corinne head to Oinville to see how their attempts to poison Corinne's father and inherit his money are progressing, they get stuck in an enormous traffic jam (and jump the queue wherever possible by driving on the wrong side of the road) caused by one of the film's many car accidents. Several drivers have been waiting so long that they have begun playing cards or chess, and, as with most depictions of traffic jams (particularly in French media), there is a constant din of car horns.
- Bottomless Magazines: Joseph, the hitchhiker who takes Corrine and Roland hostage, shoots his gun in the air several times to get them to stop calling for help, yet never reloads. Later, when Corrine gets ahold of the gun, she shoots at him several times, and also never reloads.
- Catchphrase: Corrine and Roland ask "which way is Oinville?" It gets to the point of being a Madness Mantra for them both.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Emily Brontë is the one. She delivers an entire ode to a random rock. In the end she's set on fire.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Near the end the hippie cannibals raid a farm house because...well, they must have had a reason. In any case, one of the girl hippies is mortally wounded. Because it's that kind of movie, she sings a song while lying in the hippie leader's arms before she dies.
- Drives Like Crazy: Everyone, apparently. The number of crashed, burning cars make rural France look like a war zone.
- Epic Tracking Shot:
- A long, long tracking shot in which the camera pans up the road that has been clogged up with an enormous traffic jam. It ends with the head of the line and a wreck that has resulted in four bodies being scattered around the road.
- Another shot shows a pianist giving a recital in a farm courtyard (he's taking his piano around by truck). In an extremely long shot the camera slowly circles around, showing the whole of the courtyard multiple times.
- Fan Disservice: An unusual verbal example. In theory it probably should be sexy when Corinne describes the threesome she had. But by the point she's talking about using an egg and a cat's bowl of milk in very unnatural ways, it just gets gross.
- A God Am I: So says the gun-wielding loon who hijacks Roland and Corinne's car.
- Hitchhiker's Leg: Hitchhiker's Genitalia instead, as Roland instructs Corinne to lie down on the road and spread her legs to get a truck to stop.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Corinne ends up eating her husband by the end of the movie.
- Medium Awareness:
- After Emily Brontë spouts nonsense when they ask her which way the town is, Roland snipes, "What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people." Shortly thereafter Corinne says "This isn't a novel, it's a film. A film is life."
- Our power couple are hitchhiking. A car stops and asks them, "Are you in a film or reality?" When Roland answers that they're in a film, the driver says "You lie too much" and takes off.
- The Oner:
- An uninterrupted ten-minute take in which Corinne very graphically describes a threesome she had with Paul and Monique.
- Also a very long take when Corrine and Roland avoid the consequences of the traffic jam by driving on the wrong side of the road, callously bypassing other drivers.
- Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: The sight of the enormous traffic jam is the first sign that something has gone deeply wrong in society.
- Random Events Plot: Basically a lot of nonsense happens after Roland and Corinne go on their trip. There's a traffic jam. A tractor crashes into a sports car and kills the driver. Roland and Corinne are carjacked. They meet cannibals.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Invoked by one of the guerilla leaders late in the film:To overcome the horror of the bourgeoisie, you need still more horror.
- Road Trip Plot: The story kicks off when Corinne and Roland drive off to see if their relatives have died yet so they can inherit the money.
- Satire: The whole film is a comically over-the-top satire on the absurdities of modern society. A scene titled "The Class Struggle" has a Communist farmer driving a tractor (he's singing "The Internationale") crash into a sports car, killing the rich aristocrat behind the wheel. His girlfriend then berates the farmer about how poor people hate rich people.
- Serious Business: Everyone takes things very seriously. Roland and Corinne have wrecked their car in a major accident (one of many, every car in this film exists to get in an accident). A corpse is lying on the road. The cars are burning. Corinne cries hysterically, "My handbag! My Hermès handbag!"
- Shout-Out:
- A title card says "The Lewis Carroll Way". It's appropriate, because the narrative "structure" of the film is a lot like Carroll's books, if Alice in Wonderland had featured cannibals and gross Three-Way Sex and innumerable car crashes and scattered corpses.
- The guerillas use names of some of Godard's favorite films, like Johnny Guitar and Gosta Berling, as codenames on the radio.
- Surrealism: The film becomes cartoonish, like an evil version of Alice in Wonderland (see Shout-Out), with nonsense following after nonsense. Why is the man in the telephone booth (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, apparently as a different character than his previous appearance as Saint-Just) singing everything he says to the person at the other end of the line.
- Three-Way Sex: One whole scene has Corinne describing to Roland in graphic detail about a threesome she had with a married couple.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Corinne sees a three-car pileup with corpses littered around, squeals "Look! Trousers by Eddy!", and proceeds to take the pants off a dead body. Of course, given how many burnt-out cars and dead bodies are all over the landscape in this film, this may actually be an uninteresting sight.
- Villain Protagonist: Two, in the persons of a husband and wife who have been slowly poisoning her father in order to gain an inheritance, and who are each plotting to murder the other.
