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Weekend (Week End)

Weekend (Week End) (1967)

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Average Rating: N/A
Critic Reviews: 3
Fresh: 3 | Rotten: 0

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Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 7,763

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Movie Info

French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's Le Weekend remains his most consistently relentless attack on the bourgeois values of his own country and the perceived imperialism of the United States. Mireille Darc plays the central character, an "average" woman who is systematically radicalized during a weekend motor trip. No sooner have the woman and her husband (Jean Yanne) embarked on their journey than they become enmeshed in the mother of all traffic jams. The motorists rave, rant, burn, rape, murder,

Aug 23, 2005

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All Critics (24) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (25) | Rotten (1) | DVD (10)

As long as cinema like this exists, there's no end in sight.

October 5, 2011 Full Review Source: Time Out New York
Time Out New York
Top Critic IconTop Critic

This apocalyptic farce-Alice in Wonderland as reconceived by the Marquis de Sade-would mark both the high point and the end of Godard's meteoric career as a popular artist.

October 4, 2011 Full Review Source: Village Voice
Village Voice
Top Critic IconTop Critic

The film must be seen, for its power, ambition, humor, and scenes of really astonishing beauty.

July 11, 2004 Full Review Source: New York Times
New York Times
Top Critic IconTop Critic

In the absurdist dark comedy, Western society never looked so sickening on film.

March 30, 2013 Full Review Source: Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Ozus' World Movie Reviews

It's all meant to be a vicious takedown of middle-class life in the late 60s, but much of it is incomprehensible today. Still, if you want to see absolute anarchy portrayed on film, you'll do no better than Weekend.

December 12, 2012 Full Review Source: Scene-Stealers.com
Scene-Stealers.com

an apocalyptic primal scream against the conformities and hypocrisies of the Americanized French bourgeoisie and one of the most lacerating and funny satires of car culture ever produced

November 27, 2012 Full Review Source: Q Network Film Desk
Q Network Film Desk

A galvanizing tirade against consumer culture and a grand proclamation of the death of cinema, Jean-Luc Godard's still-revelatory Weekend returns to North American home video as one of the best Blu-rays of the year.

November 23, 2012 Full Review Source: Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine

Uncompromisingly cynical and completely unforgiving, Week End is a satire so black, you couldn't see hope if it was dancing in front of your eyes carrying sparklers and singing La Marseillaise.

August 9, 2011 Full Review Source: Cinemania

This is Lord of the Flies as played by adults, and for Left Bank intellectuals, heady with righteous protest and wired on too many coffees and cigarettes

August 17, 2010 Full Review Source: Cinema Writer | Comment (1)
Cinema Writer

There is nothing predictable about Weekend; Godard uses the camera as a radical satirical tool, inserting it up the backside of a society he perceives as lost, constrained and confused. And so are we.

March 23, 2008 Full Review Source: Urban Cinefile
Urban Cinefile

A film that reads itself, tells the viewer what that reading should be, and at the same time tells the viewer that this reading is inaccurate and should be ignored.

January 20, 2008 Full Review Source: Antagony & Ecstasy
Antagony & Ecstasy

Visionary, insane, and barbarously funny; don't miss the chance to accept the challenge Weekend is still dying to make.

February 9, 2006 Full Review Source: F5 (Wichita, KS)

It's nice to have this superlatively nasty film on DVD in America, but what the hell is up with that corrected splice?

August 29, 2005 Full Review Source: Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine

Weekend is a luridly colorful compendium of aesthetic juxtapositions and audio-visual schisms that evoke the frustrated tenor of the era.

August 29, 2005 Full Review Source: Slant Magazine | Comments (2)
Slant Magazine

give the man credit for bitching about the human condition in style

August 22, 2005 Full Review Source: Filmcritic.com
Filmcritic.com

Audience Reviews for Weekend (Week End)

A cruel bourgeois couple take a weekend to travel to see the wife's dying father in hopes of grabbing his inheritance, but traffic patterns, civilization, and reality all break down during their journey. Jean-Luc Godard's satire in the style of Luis Bunuel mixes exhilarating ideas (the unexplained car wrecks everywhere give a sense of society collapsing) with pedantic ones (dated Marxist lectures on colonialism); it's all "very Sixites." You could see it either as Godard's last accessible film, or his first inaccessible one.
November 28, 2012
366weirdmovies
Greg S

Super Reviewer

When was the last time you had a hell lot of fun while watching a film? And we aren't even talking escapist, commercial popcorn flicks or sitcoms! Far from it. We're talking about an avant-garde surrealist film, highly disturbing yet darkly humorous at the same time....in French New Wave style!

Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" (sometimes written "Week End") will guarantee a delightfully macabre ride through hell, as a husband and wife cheating on each other decide to ride to the country to secure inheritance from the parents of the wife, by possibly murdering her father! Sounds crazy? Not half as crazy as what ensues next as their journey turns into an outlandish odyssey through a nightmare full of traffic jams and gruesome car accidents and terrorists and hippies and cannibals!

[img]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hItrCccR3F0/T6lY_ojd6qI/AAAAAAAAChc/HbKkFHlB1eM/s544/vlcsnap-2012-05-08-22h58m43s69.jpg[/img]

What "Weekend" is about is difficult to pen. Perhaps it is about Godard's bizarre vision of the apocalypse; of a bleak future that's going to see the end of civilization as we know it; a world in which people will turn on one another and start raping and looting and killing and eating each other! A world in which the bourgeois society will bear the brunt of its own materialistic trappings...when people will become so insensitive, they will even steal stuff off of dead bodies rather nonchalantly!

Or perhaps "Weekend" is merely a black comedy built around everything Godard personally hated and wanted to make fun of, through the medium he knows best...cinema! And he pulls it off like there's no tomorrow! Sometimes he also resorts to self-parody! And for that, he uses some insane yet subtle absurdist humour. Blink and you may miss some of the gems and golden lines uttered in this film. Sample this: Roland (Jean Yanne) abandons (or loses) his car and starts out on foot with his wife Corinne (Mireille Darc ). On the way there are numerous mangled bodies, victims of car accidents and the remains of their vehicles lying around, but they are just casually ignored! Roland tries to ask directions to another character in the film, gets some loony response in return and comments "What a rotten film! All we meet are crazy people!"

[img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-LYhBDjKUAAk/T6lZAodH1GI/AAAAAAAACho/H2zBQtT4aWA/s544/vlcsnap-2012-05-08-22h59m49s219.jpg[/img]

Godard, an eccentric auteur that he is, makes sure he frustrates his audiences as well as keeps them hooked with his bravura writing. Usage of intertitles isn't uncommon in a Godard film, but in "Weekend" they take on a new, entirely free form, get sprinkled arbitrarily between scenes, interrupting randomly yet trying to say something about the scene at hand. But they don't always take a serious form; sometimes some of the dialog uttered takes the form of intertitles, sometimes Godard tries to be funny by adding title cards like "A film found on scrap heap" to describe this motion picture! At other times we see some sharp political jibes.

Then there are the typical Godard idiosyncrasies including a background score that sometimes drowns the dialog and appears out of nowhere and disappears just as suddenly as it appeared; some deliberate repetitions of scenes and dialogs as if it's some editing flaw! And let's not forget the over 8 minutes long tracking shot of a traffic jam accompanied by blaring car horns in the background and car drivers cursing each other in the foreground! This shot ends in an ironic fashion that reveals the cause of the jam! The film takes dramatic turns with one bizarre event after another, subjecting us to a savagely funny ride, with senseless political speeches, oddball camerawork and ultimately an allegorical, chaotic finale.....the aim was clearly to alarm the viewer and leave him/her in a jaw-dropped state!

[img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NlMPyk9q5dQ/T6lZARh44XI/AAAAAAAAChg/WkOZCd6GptI/s544/vlcsnap-2012-05-08-22h47m41s110.jpg[/img]

There are notable movie references....although it is difficult to say in one case; a "Persona"-esque (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) monologue of Corinne narrating a particularly wild sexual adventure, and in a nod to Luis Bunuel, perhaps, a title card that reads "The Exterminating Angel" (1962). Speaking of Bunuel, it is not difficult to find some creative similarities between "Weekend" and Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie". Nonetheless, this could be a first film of its kind for Godard (it is a significant departure compared to his earlier 60s works) and he makes sure he leaves no stone unturned in delivering a masterwork. "Weekend" could very well have been rechristened "Week End" (as it is known in some countries) owing to the fact that this was Godard's final film of his most celebrated cinematic period.

Highly imaginative, but pure Madness; Godard's "Weekend" = Luis Bunuel on steroids!


Score: 10/10 (Hands down!)

[img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-RSu58qX9n2k/T6lZBZ_QsxI/AAAAAAAAChs/BCZSLWr6mos/s544/vlcsnap-2012-05-08-23h02m42s159.jpg[/img]
May 8, 2012
Aditya Gokhale
Aditya Gokhale

Super Reviewer

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Foreign Titles

  • Weekend (1967) (DE)
  • Week End (UK)
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