Week End

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Le weekend
Film poster
Directed by	Jean-Luc Godard
Written by	Jean-Luc Godard
Starring	Mireille Darc Jean Yanne
Music by	Antoine Duhamel
Cinematography	Raoul Coutard
Editing by	Agnès Guillemot
Distributed by	Athos Films
Release date(s)	December 29, 1967
Running time	105 min.
Language	French
Budget	$250,000 (estimated)

Le weekend (1967) is a black comedy film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, both of whom were mainstream French TV stars. Jean-Pierre Léaud, iconic comic star of numerous French New Wave films including Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups (The Four Hundred Blows) and Godard's earlier Masculin, féminin, also appears in two roles. Raoul Coutard served as cinematographer.

[edit] Summary

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A stylish and rather jaded bourgeois French married couple, Roland and Corrine (he in his forties, she in her twenties) set out for her parents' place in the country to secure her inheritance - by murdering her father, if necessary. They find themselves on a chaotically picaresque car journey through a French countryside populated by increasingly bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. The plot becomes little more than an excuse for brilliantly inventive vignettes involving everything from schematic delineations of the class struggle to figures from literature and history, creating an overall impression of a humorous, beautiful, but also senseless and frightening world. All this is also the armature for great formal experimentation, including intertitles that intrude suddenly to cut off the action. Near the beginning two pop up to let you know you're watching 'a film adrift in the cosmos' and then 'a film found on a scrap heap'.

Corinne and Roland do eventually arrive at her parents' place - days late, thanks to the various obstacles their journey's thrown up - only to find that her father has died and her mother is refusing them a share of the spoils. Without much thought, they kill her and set back off on the road - only to fall into the hands of a group of radical hippy cannibals, in whose encampment the film ends.

[edit] Context

Week-End came roughly at the end of an extraordinarily productive period for Godard in the sixties, during which he made at least two films a year. Radically leftist, he describes his output during this time as the angry rattling of a metal cup against the bars of his cell - and expresses his frustration that this elicited nothing but the banal approbation of the bourgeoisie.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Cast

• Mireille Darc as Corinne
• Jean Yanne as Roland
• Paul Gégauff as Pianist
• Jean-Pierre Léaud as Saint-Just
• Blandine Jeanson as Emily Brontë
• Yves Afonso as Tom Thumb
• Juliet Berto as The Radical

[edit] External links

• Week End at the Internet Movie Database