Godard Season: Week-End (Dir Jean-Luc Godard, 1h45m, 1967)

All movements, all careers have to end somewhere. Jean-Luc Godard died last year at the age of 91, in his native Switzerland, his last film, The Image Book, dispensing with actors, with narrative, a series of vignettes of footage with Godard's narration, a meditation on a fractured Middle East coming four years before in late 2018, leaving behind two unfinished films, one of which will screen at Cannes this coming May. His passing in September 2022 was simply the final death of Jean-Luc Godard, and his first of several, the death of Godard, the father of the French New Wave, would come at Cannes, in 1968, with Truffaut and Godard reuniting one final time, to protest, and eventually successfully curtail the festival.

It is the moment that Godard cuts ties with the New Wave, with the cinema he became disillusioned and eventually politically opposed to, the moment that French student politics and its nascent form of cinema, birthed from the same place, collide, as Paris erupted into open revolt. This decisive action, hot on the heels of a politically charged, nihilistic grenade of a film, would see Godard turn his back on the movement he had helped found in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, and turn to a yet more experimental, and overtly left wing form of cinema. This is the story of the film that broke the French New Wave. This is Godard's farewell to his early career. This is Week-End.

A bourgeois couple, planning to murder the other, and both relishing their relationships with others, as they plan to travel to the countryside to extort money from her dying father, even if it means murder. Their lives are profane, and often perverted, in comparison to Godard's figures of previous films; the film essentially beginning with a near ten minute monologue from the woman, Corinne (Mireille Darc), relishing in her sexual exploits with a couple, in a section that lifts straight from the French pornographic novella Story of the Eye (L'histoire de l'œil, written by George Battaile in 1928). Her husband Roland (Jean Yanne), is at once passive, and deeply voyeuristic, urging both her sexual foibles, and her plot against her parents, on.

Gone is Belmondo, gone are the cinema loving, café dancing heroes or the disaffected youth or the genre-surrogates of previous work. In their place are these people who feel...parasitic; five years later, Bunuel would explore these vicious bloody self-destructive poseurs in his 1972 film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie), but Jean-Luc cuts the surrealism and keeps the meat, the gristle of these unlikeable, dangerous, and pretentious middle class Parisians Godard, in short, wants us to regard these two figures, far from the free-loving and identifiable protagonists of his previous work, as remote, disturbing, and, most importantly, bourgeois, perhaps the most obvious identifier, to how much the director's view had shifted in the seven years of his career to date. As the couple rev up their car, crash into the neighbour's, and, now being shot at, so they roar off at high speed towards carnage and the complex political hinterlands that are now the focus of Godard's cinema. Godard has become politicised, and Week-End is a cinematic declaration of war on the French middle class

To call Godard an apolitical director is a disservice-Le Petit Soldat attempts to tackle the Algerian War of Independence, and the long death of French Colonialism, Les Carabiniers is overtly anti-war, but this is to perhaps overlook Godard as general social commentator, and overlook Paris as a political melting pot, but, in a decade ruled over till its very end by the figure of De Gaulle, so a myriad number of political factions vied for control. Vietnam changed this. Vietnam politicised Godard as never before, and the first hints of this arrive in Pierrot le Fou (1965), a film that not only addresses the war through dialogue but through its style, its use of newsreel. Godard's sense of anger is palpable, felt through the mechanical changes in Godard's visual style. Over the next two years, Godard becomes not merely the voyeur of disaffected, cine-obsessed young adults, but a maker of films that actively spoke for them, and explored the fragmenting politics of his nation.

First would come Masculin Féminin,(1966) in which Godard would mix his verité style, interviewing his characters on camera, with an analytical eye on the ever-more politically active youth-his political bent upon the film typified by the famous quote "This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola" capturing a youth caught in the clash between their increasingly politicised movements, and the capitalism ephemera of 1960s teenager-hood. Whilst Made in USA (1966) would see Godard pen one last love letter to the American Noir, Two or Three Things I Know About Her would see the director take on the role of essayist, shining a light via the character of a prostitute into the rapidly shifting politics, and culture, of France.

Finally, almost as prelude to Week-End, would come La Chinoise (1967), in which a group of students plan an assassination, which would actively explore the growing student movements that would soon make their presence known on the streets of Paris, exploring ideology, the war in Vietnam, American Imperialism and Mao's China, against an increasing dissatisfaction behind the camera, from Godard himself, with bourgeois narrative cinema. It's a fractiousness, as vignettes, interviews, and the breaking-down of cinematic language to deliver political debate increasingly haunt Godard's films of 1966 and 1967, that comes to a fore in Week-End.

Our duo make their way out of Paris, and into a bizarre tableaux that belies both Godard's increasingly politicised viewpoint seeping into the film's very visuals, as the camera follows Corrine and Roland, in an unbroken shot that lasts for nearly ten minutes as they pass through a traffic jam of dozens of cars, trucks, and the presence of Brecht in this sequence. Like the pornographic story that precedes it, this is a form of titillation, a visual story being told, building to a climax. Brecht, Godard, asks us what this traffic jam is meant to represent-is this merely a group of people all heading in the same direction waylaid by an accident? Is this simply cinematographer Raul Coutard showing off his ability to keep a nearly ten minute pan along a colossal procession interesting? Is this Godard using the larger than expected budget by casting Darc as his heroine to the most?

Or, as our bourgeois couple cut through, honking their horn, is this the class struggle in miniature, our duo unaware, or seemingly disconnected from the increasingly apocalyptic events around them? We see them reach the front of this gargantuan traffic jam, to where several cars have crashed, bodies littered in a horrifying assemblage through which this duo drive, passive, and wrapped up in their own discussion. Car crashes litter the film, burning wreckage and bodies, that seem to arrive out of nowhere, visitations, and, in the hindsight of the 1968 protests that would rock France mere months after the release of Week-End, what feel like ominous premonitions of the unrest to come that hove into view. It is as much an invocation of violence to prove a point as it is a jolt, reminding its audience of the murderous intent of its central duo, and their death-seeking ultra-hedonistic behaviour.

Our duo roll through another accident, ignoring the grieving widow, and the hard-working farmer who plead for their arbitration, even as Godard's puckish sensibility have the dead man pose alongside those mourning, and our travelling duo. The very language of cinema is beginning to break down as they plunge past more road accidents, burning overturned cars, and into a bizarre and unsettling French countryside where they are as likely to come across yet more violence, including a gun-toting illusionist who hijacks them with his partner, before escaping into a flock of sheep, as they are to come across authors Emily Bronte and Saint-Just. Their car crashes, in a series of almost knowingly perfunctory jump cuts, and they are accosted by a poet as they try to use the phone box he seemingly resides in and attempt to steal his car. They lurch cross-country and try to flag down a lift but find people howling insults as they roar past, or refusing to let them hitch-hike due to their political beliefs, mocking them as they drive off.

It is here that they are confronted by (in some cases very real) revolutionaries; this duo of revolutionary garbage collectors from French-colonised countries, including real life revolutionary and Independence fighter, Omar Diop (who also appeared in La Chinoise and would later go on to be murdered in prison in Senegal in 1973 whilst part of the country's independence movement), lay forth their world view, their left wing ideals, and the treatment of the countries France has colonised in the previous century. Our duo remains passive, and, as each of the politicised workers lays forth, Godard holds on the other, impassive, as they eat a sandwich-our protagonists are not interested in what they have to say, other than the transportation they provide.

These two themes, of an increasingly politicised working class and the increasingly blind and complacent borgoiuse sleepwalking into their downfall, dominate the rest of the film. As they briefly take a soujourn through a farmyard, the duo are not interested in the views of the increasingly militant working class, and this will soon become fatal, as, coming across another accident, they are taken hostage by the militant Front de Libération de la Seine et Oise (FLSO), who dominate the last third of the film as things begin to spiral out of control, and as Godard's bourgeois couple get exactly what their detached and parasitic existences deserve.

Godard would not make another narrative film for 13 years; shortly after the release of Week-End, Jean Luc and Francois would find themselves reuniting to protest the Cannes Film Festival-their final collaboration would be rushing the stage together to stop the curtains from opening and Carlos Saura's Peppermint Frappé from screening, a moment that would bring the 1968 festival to a premature close and Godard to pronounce his contemporaries and himself as makers of films that could not possibly keep up with sociopolitical events. French New Wave as a genre would stagger on a few more years, but by this point, Godard was collaborating with the Dziga Vertov Group, formed of revolutionary film makers who were actually revolutionaries, making five films with fellow Maoists, driven by class and racial inequality, only returning to mainstream film-making with the heavily autobiographical Every Man for Himself (Sauve Qui Peut (la vie), 1980).

Whilst highly respected, Godard later work would never truly achieve the same level of influence his films of 1960 to 1967 would. It didn't need to. Between Breathless in 1960 and Week-End in 1967, Godard made 15 films, a body of work that remains almost incomparably influential, pulling his nation's cinema from mawkish self-celebration to political wrecking ball. By the time Godard held that curtain shut at Cannes, by the time that Week-End bullishly declares "The End of Cinema", Godard's legacy as one of the greatest film-makers of the century was assured. Week-End, for its part is a farewell to the mainstream, as one of cinema's great pioneers prophetises the doom that would engulf his country less than a year later, in searingly political, and bleakly funny terms as a bourgeois couple travel into the French Underworld.

Rating: Highly Recommended


Next week, we set sail with a new nautical season, and begin with the film that made pirates cool again, in the return of the swashbuckler, with Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

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