Weekend (1967)

A bourgeois couple (Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne) take a weekend drive to the country where they hope to secure her inheritance from her dying father. The journey will be memorable. Written and directed by Jean Luc Godard (BREATHLESS), the first hour is an outrageous and audacious surreal trek as the couple sees civilization imploding around them. They are not victims however but contributors to this breakdown. Godard's justifiably famous panning shot of a deadly traffic jam (it may have been an unconscious influence on the opening scene of LA LA LAND) is spectacular and Darc has a memorable monologue about a sexual experience that rivals Bibi Andersson's sexual memory in PERSONA. Alas, the film's second hour contains Godard in a didactic mode as characters and voiceovers lecture us. It isn't art when Stanley Kramer did it and it's not art when Godard does it though of course, Godard is an artist where Kramer was not. I could have done without Godard rubbing the animal slaughter in our faces too. The film is eerily prescient. Watching the erosion of civilization which seemed exaggerated in 1967 seems all too real in 2021. With Jean Pierre Leaud and Paul Gegauff.