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Le weekend is a 1967 black comedy movie written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and shot in full color by Raoul Coutard. When it was first shown in France, it was recommended that viewers be 18 years old or older. Image File history File links Weekendfilm. ...
Jean-Luc Godard. ...
Jean-Luc Godard. ...
Mireille Darc is a French model and actress born in Toulon, France in 1938. ...
Jean Yanne (July 18, 1933 - May 22, 2003) was a French actor and film director. ...
Antoine Duhamel, born July 30, 1925 is a French composer, orchestra conductor and music teacher. ...
Raoul Coutard is a French cinematographer who has contributed to over seventy five films. ...
December 29 is the 363rd day of the year (364th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 2 days remaining. ...
1967 (MCMLXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ...
1967 (MCMLXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ...
Black comedy, also known as black humor, is a subgenre of comedy and satire where topics and events normally treated seriously – death, mass murder, sickness, madness, terror, drug abuse, rape, etc. ...
This article is about motion pictures. ...
Jean-Luc Godard. ...
Raoul Coutard is a French cinematographer who has contributed to over seventy five films. ...
Plot
A bourgeois French married couple, consisting of a husband in his forties and a wife in her late twenties, find themselves alarmingly short on funds, and though they have been poisoning the wife's wealthy parents every Saturday for years, they find themselves lacking the inheritance they most certainly don't deserve, and accordingly resolve to drive off to the countryside where her parents live, and borrow some more money. Bourgeois at the end of the thirteenth century. ...
Aside from an initial aerial shot over a parking lot where people fight over a car, and run around the car, the rest of the movie is shot more or less conventionally, from the perspective of a camera mounted to a dolly, or travelling on tracks especially built for moving shots.
The movie begins in a nicely arranged upstairs apartment, darkened but for the light that shines into the apartment. The apartment belongs to Roland and Corinne, husband and wife, framed against the brightly lit window. A few questions here and there from the husband evoke a long and boring story from the wife, who must explain a recent weakness of hers. Outside, beneath them, is the view of the parking lot. It appears that they have been enjoying an open marriage where fidelity is the last thing on their minds, and ménages à trois are acceptable and commonplace. A ménage à trois is a relationship or domestic arrangement in which three people, often a married couple and another lover, live together or are romantically or sexually involved. ...
Fight in the Parking Lot One of the first gags in the movie relates to the parking lot.
Although the vehicles in the parking lot are all nicely made and well-parked, the husband hops in his car, revs up the engine, and throws it into reverse. Hardly 10 meters behind him, his car smacks into the bumper of another car. A young boy dressed like an indian with a headdress on, and armed with a bow and arrow (with little rubber suction cups at the end of his arrow) witnesses the collision, and yells for his mom and dad. The boy's mother runs out of the apartment building, and demands an exchange of "particulars." The driver, however, denies the need to exchange paperwork, saying (in French), "It's not much of a bump, and that's what bumpers are made for - bumps - it's ordinary wear and tear - nothing to worry about." In moments the woman's husband emerges from the apartment building, at first with a handgun, and then - miraculously - with a hunting rifle, but our heroes are already speeding away from the scene as the man fires off several rounds.
Traffic Jams A little bit before noon, the man and wife are soon entangled in a nightmarish traffic jam, one which seems to foretell the entire collapse of industrialized Western society. Their progress on an unusually narrow country road is hindered by a row of cars that are in varying degrees of distress. The situation appears to be exacerbated by the decisions of the government to recognize the privileges of a few (a landed aristocracy) at the expense of the many (the motorists, all seeking to escape a bad situation getting worse). As can be seen from a very long, ten minute take was filmed in parallel to the country road, the traffic jam is so bad that somehow, somewhere along the line, some of the cars even got reversed in places, so there was no certain way of knowing which direction the traffic was supposed to be going.
Whatever the advantages are to allowing aristocracies the pleasure of having wide, wide fields separated by narrow, narrow roads it is lost on the viewer when it becomes clear that modern society has exceeded the bounds that history has accorded it with.
In shooting the very first traffic jam scene, it appears that hundreds of cars, perhaps one or two thousand cars, have been brought in as props for a gag that takes ten minutes to unwind and run through. Although the country road may be ten feet wide, there are beautiful expanses of empty farm land just a foot or two away from the road. The viewer cannot help but ask himself, "Why not make inroads through the farmer's fields and drive there, bypassing whatever is jamming up the road?" And in apparent answer to this question, our heroes have decided to leave niceties behind, and drive on the left hand side of the road.
Picking Up Hitchhikers Approximately 27 minutes into the movie, our heroes appear to have picked up a couple of hitchhikers that cannot be seen but for the sleeves on their arms, one being fashioned from a red fabric and the other, blue, these being colors that are arguably patriotic colors - taken from the colors for the American or French flags. The hitchhikers are the kind that are very hard to get along with; they trade vulgar epithets, and Roland asks the other man if he had sex with his wife, would that count as a scratch? With the camera trained on Roland (behind the wheel) and Corinne (in the passenger seat), the dispute boils over in the form of ever angrier exchanges, hands and arms clawing each other, and grabbing with the drivers in front. Corinne and Rolland find themselves having to bite the hands and arms to make them let go.
If this wasn't bad enough, five minutes later (about 30 minutes into the movie), the man and wife again find themselves in the company of hitchhikers, but this time the tables are turned, as superior force is employed to enforce the relationship. A man wearing a rain jacket and his consort, a woman wearing a short red skirt, force Roland and Corinne to turn around and drive back the way they were coming, all at the point of a gun he'd kept hidden under his poncho.
Becoming Hitchhikers Bad, careless driving soon changes their luck irreversibly when Roland smacks into two cars, and they miraculously crawl out from under the wreckage. Although they survive the collision, Corinne is overwrought with grief for losing her designer brand Hermes handbags in the inferno raging in the middle of the road.
Where formerly they were well-heeled bourgeoisie, they are now down-on-their-heels hitchhikers, transformed as the result of Roland's recklessly bad driving.
On foot now as hitchhikers, they are glad to get a ride from anyone happening to go their way. At that, a garbage truck comes by, and in short order they are allowed to ride in the back with the garbage, provided they pick up all of the garbage on the rest of their route to the little town of Oinville (French for Wineville). Even as impromptu sanitation workers, they are not good workers but spill the garbage they bring back to the truck. Their hearts are clearly not in their work.
Inaction in Action On arriving at the little farm town of Oinville (Wineville), Roland and Corinne wait for a very real musical interlude to conclude before going on with their task of borrowing from Corinne's parents. The musical interlude is real in that an actual baby grand piano has been brought in and stationed before the main barn, and a real pianist has been put to the task of playing a classical composition for the benefit of the townspeople biding their time there. A woman stands to the side of the pianist, turning the scoresheets as he plays. The camera makes wide panning circles around the center of the farm town, first turning clockwise a couple times, and then reversing and turning counterclockwise, showing a handful of people standing around, leaning on posts, or maybe sitting, waiting for the music to end. While this goes on, an authority figure declares that all modern music - including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles has its roots in classical music. As the camera pans around the middle of the town, it eventually comes to rest on a sign that's been placed on the piano. The piano is for sale. What makes this peculiar, is that piano sales could possibly be directed to the farm folk that inhabit the little town, or that a manufacturer of pianos could possibly have thought that that was a good place to set up shop and sell them there. This article is about the rock band. ...
The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 as part of their first tour of the United States, promoting their first hit single there, I Want To Hold Your Hand. ...
Revolutionary Cells Aside from inexplicable characters like Saint-Just and Emily Bronte, protagonists Roland and Corinne, now mere pedestrians, have somehow taken a wrong turn into the country, and have begun to hike through a trail in the forest. It is there on the outskirts of someone's family picnic that they encounter a radical youth group come out of the woods to bushwhack them, and steal their picnic baskets at gunpoint. Following the gang of radicals on their way back to camp, it is seen that the radicals are a member of a radical revolutionary cell camping out at on the shore of an ancient lake in a forest. Standing by the lake, the leader of the revolutionaries recites an ode to the Ancient Ocean and delivers it like a prayer to an ancient, forgotten sea god, much as the ancient Celts, Greeks, or Romans must have worshipped Poseidon or Neptune. Saint-Just can refer to: Antoine Louis Léon de Richebourg de Saint-Just Saint-just cheese Saint-Just is also the name or part of the name of several communes in France: Saint-Just, in the Ain département Saint-Just, in the Ardèche département Saint-Just, in the Cantal département...
Emily Brontë (July 30, 1818 - December 19, 1848) was a British novelist and poet, best remembered for her one novel Wuthering Heights, an acknowledged classic of English literature. ...
Neptune reigns in the city centre, Bristol, formerly the largest port in England outside London. ...
Adjective Neptunian Atmospheric characteristics Surface pressure ≫100 MPa Hydrogen - H2 80% ±3. ...
Famine and Cannibalism But the revolutionaries are famished as civilization has collapsed, and the viewer sees that modern society is beginning to return to a more primaeval condition. Apparently in response to eminent starvation, the radicals resort to cannibalism, preying on the meat and goods of foreign tourists fallen prey to the predations, and upon anyone else unlucky enough to have been found on the outskirts to their forest. Although civilization has collapsed, the radicals attempt to maintain radio contact by shortwave with other revolutionary cells around the world, employing as code names the names of popular movies like Battleship Potemkin or Johnny Guitar. For the battleship, see Russian battleship Potemkin article Броненосец Потемкин (1925) (variously Bronenosec Potemkin, Battleship Potemkin, Battleship Potyomkin and The Battleship Potemkin) is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein. ...
Johnny Guitar is a 1954 Western, released by Republic Pictures. ...
The movie is filled with horrific violence, political soliloquies, and random-seeming sounds and edits. Godard did not make another narrative film for several years afterwards. For some, Le weekend represents an apex to which he never rose again. Violence refers to acts of aggression and abuse which causes or intends to cause criminal injury or harm to persons, and (to a lesser extent) animals and property. ...
Producers Attempted to Limit the Director's Art During the filming of Week End, Jean-Luc Godard ran into numerous conflicts with his producers, and every time they came up with suggestions on how to save money, he angrily retaliated by buying new cars off the assembly line and smashing them up for the sake of the movie.
As can be seen in the movie, nice new cars were purchased purely for the purpose of mangling; rusty old cars from junkyards weren't employed as props when brand new cars could be brought in, and smashed up, instead. Most of the cars littering the countryside were bought brand new, and smashed up for the sake of the movie.
Cast Mireille Darc is a French model and actress born in Toulon, France in 1938. ...
Jean Yanne (July 18, 1933 - May 22, 2003) was a French actor and film director. ...
Jean-Pierre Léaud (born May 5, 1944) is a French actor. ...
Tom Thumb hitches a ride on a butterfly Tom Thumb is the name of a traditional hero in English folklore who was no bigger than his fathers thumb. ...
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