Another of the foreign films that TCM ran quite some time ago that I finally got around to watching just before it expired from my DVR was Weekend. As has been the case for some time with my being a bit ahead of the game in terms of posting, I wrote up this post not long after watching the film but by the time this post goes live it may already have expired.
The movie opens up at what looks like it may be a vacation resort, with a couple staying in a place with a nice balcony. They get a phone call, and the wife in the couple, Corinne (Mireille Darc), discusses what to do with getting her father from the clinic. Later conversations reveal that she and her husband Roland (Jean Yanne) are waiting for her dad to die, and that hopefully it will be before he can re-write his will: they've been poisoning him slowly. Hence why they want to be the ones to pick him up from the clinic. After the phone call, we see some random violence in the parking lot below, as a fender-bender results in one driver getting shot by another.
But before our couple can head off to get Dad, we get a bizarre scene of Corinne talking to her analyst about some sort of BDSM threesome she's a part of, which doesn't involve her husband. The scene goes on, and on, and is badly underlit. After that the couple finally sets off for Dad's home town of Oinville (Google suggests there are a couple of Oinvilles, all an hour or two from central Paris depending on traffic). But they cause a fender-bender of their own, and the bratty little kid whose parents own the hit car tries to cause a violent scene.
That's about the least violence in the movie. Along the road to Oinville, the couple pass a long, long, long stretch of parked cars as though we're in a traffic jam, although the couple continually passes on the left. Some of the cars are clearly broken down or have been in accidents, but not all of them, which makes one wonder why those other cars decided to stay in this traffic jam. Apparently director Jean-Luc Godard is trying to make some sort of message with this scene. It is, however, about the least blatant of the political/cultural messaging in the movie.
The rest of the movie seems to be the couple trying to get to Oinville and either passing more violent auto wrecks, or getting involved with people who are famous historical political philosopers or revolutionaries trying to impose their own radical political views. The couple eventually does get to Oinville, only to find out that Dad has already died and they're not getting much of an inheritance.
The problem with Weekend isn't what those political philosophers are talking about so much as that these non-narrative scenes are not only in the movie, but drown out the movie as a whole. I got the impression watching Weekend that Godard had this idea of himself being oh-so-clever by trying to make such a film, when in fact it gets tedious quickly. But then again I also get the impression that people like me who find a film like this tedious deserve to have it inflicted on them. Don't they know what's good for them?
I've mentioned quite a few times on this blog my belief that a lot of people over the years have it in for foreign films because of the perception of them being arthouse stuff. Godard might well be the apotheosis of arthouse. So if you like arthouse you may well love Weekend; if you don't you'll probably hate it.
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