117 - Weekend, 1967, France. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

117 - Weekend, 1967, France. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.

Road trip!

Wait.

This road trip is not going so well.

If it is even really happening at all.

Are we in a film or reality?

Or in someone else's film?

Or in Godard's nightmare?

Or in a Hieronymus Bosch universe painted as a J Crew catalog?

Do you remember the 1970 Arthur Hiller movie The Out-of-Towners, written by Neil Simon, with a score by Quincy Jones, and starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis?

A husband and wife go on a business trip and everything goes wrong.

Well, this is not that movie.

This is nothing like that movie.

In this movie a husband and wife go on a road trip and everything goes wrong.

But everything goes wrong because the director is celebrating his own destruction of moviemaking.

Somewhat like a rockstar ceasing to play music in that moment in order to smash his guitar against the stage and then set it on fire.

Jean-Luc Godard seems to wish he could smash the camera and then set it on fire.

At least he is able to set cars on fire.  Many cars.  Throughout the movie.

And have people strangle each other, shoot each other, set each other on fire, get trapped under cars, casually rape each other, and finally cook and eat each other.

Yeah.  This road trip has not turned out so well.

Roland and Corinne begin the trip wanting to kill each other.

But first they intend to go to Corinne's parents on their deathbed and steal their money.

Roland backs the car into the bumper of another car.  A little boy is fighting him.  The woman who owns it comes out and starts to strangle him.  A man comes out with a machine gun and starts to shoot at them.

They get away.

They pass through a famous extended tracking shot, where cinematographer Raoul Coutard had to acquire every last piece of track for that model dolly in all of France.

So that the camera could travel the length of the road alongside Roland and Corinne.

So that we can see a long line of cars set up superficially in a traffic jam but in actuality an absurdist parade.

With one nonsensically staged pile-up after another.

This film purports to be a critique on middle-class society.

It seems more a nihilistic celebration of destruction.

Godard is shifting and about to abandon narrative filmmaking in order to pursue other means of expressing his growing political positions.

Here he paints a bitter, contemptuous, cynical portrait of humanity, and he does so with glee.