Jean-Luc Godard's Week-end (1967)

Godard's Week-end is often regarded, and advertised, as a film to shock, containing as it does scenes of murder, rape and cannibalism, but this is nonsense because these violent scenes take place off-scene. Godard is certainly film director who has a great ability to shock, but not in the content of his films as such, more in the extremely original way he makes them. The plot of Week-end isn't really important, which is just as well because there isn't really one there, and the motivation behind the action is in effect a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin. A married couple, Roland Durand (Jean Yann) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) are on their way to Corinne's parents and after their inheritance, even if it means murder. They get held up by a big traffic accident, crash their car, and on their return journey are kidnapped by the Front de Liberation de la Seine-et-Oise. Roland is killed trying to escape and Corinne becomes a member of the group.

It's what happens on the way that is the focus of interest, as well as what Godard is saying. This was Godard's last commercial film before he moved on to another stage of film-making. It is apocalyptic, an extreme beyond which it is difficult to imagine going beyond, and although it is now viewed as a great film, at the time of release it baffled many people. It is, as might be expected, a continuation of Godard's criticism of consumer capitalism, but Godard pushes the boundaries as never before.

The main point of attention is the car, that hugely important extension of the human being, and here Godard goes out of his way to illustrate how it has become a symbol not only of wealth but also worth, how it distorts reality to the point of madness. In fact, to the point that the car – far from being an advance in civilisation – actually not only enslaves us but turns us into savages. This is seen near the beginning of the film when the Durands set out on their journey of greed and a child dressed in redskin gear yells at Roland for bumping into his father's parked car. Despite Roland's attempt to bribe the child into silence, the mother comes out and throws tennis balls at him, and her husband fires a shotgun. (Many people in the film have guns.)

And then comes the famous eight-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam due to an accident with several fatalities. Although the viewer is blasted out by car horns, the individualism that the car symbolises has been transgressed and the road is now a stationary public space with men playing ball with children in other cars, people picnicking, playing chess on the tarmac, and card games on car bonnets. As the Durands eventually pass the dead bodies they do so casually, as if what they see is an everyday occurrence. And scenes such as this as repeated, with multiple burning car pile-ups and bodies strewn across the countryside being passed very casually. In fact – perhaps a more disturbing thing – the wrecks seem positioned in such a way as to appear almost as works of art.

On their way, the Durands also meet 'Emily Brontë', Tom Thumb, and 'Saint-Just': Godard, as usual, is throwing in various cultural references, and a Mozart is played on a piano in a farmyard, Jean-Pierre Léaud sings Guy Béart's 'Allô...tu m'entends ?' in a phone box, the terrorist's drummer quotes from Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror, there is an allusion to Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, etc. In this last mentioned scene there is perhaps one of the most extreme distancing devices in the film: Corrine is speaking to a man friend about sex, and although she's in her underwear there is an absence of titillation because the lighting is too dark to see much at all, and the background music frequently drowns out the language spoken.

Week-end is nevertheless a dazzling tour de force, to some extent a prediction of May 1968, although the most shocking scenes are the murder of a pig and a fowl.