Week End (1967)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) I don’t have a charitable soul, so I won’t blunt it: Writer-director Jean-Luc Godard went insane during the 1960s, becoming increasingly political, eccentric, experimental and hermetic. None of those things are necessarily bad, but taken together, they made him unable to turn in a conventional film that got to the point in a way that others could follow. He wasn’t completely crazy by 1967, so Week End still contains a few striking moments of cinema—most notably a very, very, very long travelling shot depicting characters moving alongside a prodigious traffic jam on a rural road, the punchline being an incredibly gory car accident causing the holdup. That kicker carries to the rest of the film, which becomes increasingly graphic and unpleasant le longer it goes on, the unacceptability threshold crossed with the on-camera slaughter on an animal in the third act. No longer interested in doing anything but lambaste the film, I’ll point out that while 1967 Godard could still put together a scene, he was no longer able to tell a story: the film posits a background of social decay leading to widespread violence and anarchy. Within that framework, though? An ill-defined couple drives around and gets murdered, the end. There’s rape, immolation and cannibalism as well. There is dark humour (in the surrealist tradition) throughout the film, as well as an intentional interest in breaking down the barriers of narrative cinema—for instance in showing actors preparing for a shot and getting out-of-character once the director yells cut. But the only interpretation of the film that makes sense to me is that this is the film that documents Godard’s cinematic breakdown, his smarter-than-thou lassitude with the mechanics of filmmaking becoming outright hostility for his audience. Self-indulgence doesn’t even begin to explain what he’s up to here, simply throwing stuff up on the screen because he can, not because it makes sense. By the end of Week End, I’m not amused or charmed at the tweaking of cinema convention—I’m furious that an animal was killed for it, that the film revels in pointless violence and that a jester’s funny instincts are presented in such an incoherent fashion. If Week End had been the last of Godard’s movies, there would be an extra oomph to it—but no, not only did he spend another decade throwing up increasingly hermetic political screeds, but he would then return to commercial filmmaking, perhaps as a retirement fund. One thing remains obvious: Godard was one crazy coocoo, and he certainly wasn’t punk enough to stand by his rebellion.