Do whatever you want

Kylie 2022-01-18 08:01:28

This is Godard's most laissez-faire, unrestricted, culminating experiment in film form. If any film can represent Godard's artistic attainments and pursuits in the early days, it is undoubtedly "Weekend". The integration of Godard's elements, the insertion of a large number of illustrations and color subtitles blocked the continuity of the shot, and the continuity of segmentation viewing anytime and anywhere. A large number of text lines are spoken through actor monologues, either facing the camera or voice-over. The separation of text and picture is like PPT or visual perception. Godard's video experiment broke out completely in this film. At the same time, this film is also Godard's most expressive work.

At the beginning of the film, the camera focused on a woman, who told a man next to her in a dim room about her 3P fornication experience with a man and another woman. Next, a man and wife hurried out and started the car. This couple is the main character throughout the movie. They plan to get their mother's inheritance by unscrupulous means, so they rush to their mother's house eagerly. The husband is very anxious, afraid that there will be traffic jams at night. So he hurriedly started the car, and when he started, he ran into a neighbor's car. The two families fought. The neighbor's man shot the couple and the husband immediately drove away.

As the saying goes, they are in a traffic jam in the end. And it was the traffic jam scene that became the most talked-about genius of Godard's career. In the eight-minute traffic jam, Godard's lens slowly moved horizontally from left to right, colorful, different shapes, and different functions of cars appeared in the lens from right to left while honking the horn. The husband drove slowly through the long queue of traffic jams. In the end, the camera came to the scene of a car accident, where people died and blood was shed. The couple drove fast across the blood-stained asphalt road. Since then, the film has developed in the direction of surrealism and arbitrary collage. The places where the couple went were the scene of the car accident, with dead bodies, blood, and deformed vehicles. Godard used the ubiquitous car accidents to express his clear position: either traffic jams or car accidents. Then they had a bumpy road and were hijacked by a young couple. He grabbed someone's car and asked two neurotic philosophers for directions, but the answers were not what they asked. You need to answer political questions to get on the bus. Godard's unique sense of humor is everywhere. Listen to a pianist playing Mozart piano music in the messy factory yard. The camera rotates round after round to look around the people in the yard to listen, a total of three rounds. Time stops, art is the highest. The couple found two garbage workers to eat. As a result, the garbage workers were eating sandwiches while looking at the camera to express political opinions about white colonization and class exploitation. The husband killed the mother, and the dead chicken on the mother's hand fell to the ground, and blood was sprayed on the dead chicken. They got 5 million inheritance and became rich. As a result, the couple and friends holding the 5 million inheritance were caught by the Communist guerrillas during a picnic. (Godard really loves the Communist Party...) The husband was killed, and the pig was stewed into soup, and the wife and other guerrillas ate it. Another guerrilla was reciting words about class, beliefs, and ancient oceans from beginning to end under the rhythm of a drum set.

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Extended Reading
  • Kristian 2022-04-19 09:02:43

    Godard, who is marked by editing, has made some of the most interesting long shots. The super-long traffic jam scene here is absolutely amazing. The ambient sound of the horn replaces all the details, dialogue and quarrel, and the sense of hilarity is comparable to that of Tati. The latter's traffic is as staged as the piano field and the supermarket shots in everything. The plot of constant quarrels also has similar attempts in sound processing. For example, in the opening scene, the backlit men and women tell the erotic double-flying story of Bataille in detail, and the suspenseful music of film noir is loud enough to overwhelm the narrative. The static embedding of fauxtograph and the misplacement of the video during the car accident are very funny haha. Road rage's picaresque road trip, through hardships, car crashes, deadly battlefields, encounters with various characters, forming a world class historical narrative - with a narration narration, and finally riding a worker's truck to the country's mother's house, killing the mother who is unwilling to share her inheritance Blood stained skinned rabbits. The female and animal cruelty in it is disturbing and unnecessary, but the whole film is definitely one of the director's best The end of a movie about people through cannibalism

  • Winston 2022-04-22 07:01:48

    Are Godard's films really free? Endless catharsis of absurd violence, long essays and sermons that are more "independent" than the independence era. Are movies bourgeois? Can anti-film and anti-bourgeois be equated? The long-moving shot of the highway is a slap in the face of the traffic jam weekend, the proletarian avant-garde submachine gun is held in the hands of the madman Godard, and the movie is a corpse that has been punched out countless holes.

Weekend quotes

  • Saint-Just: [in the midst of a bourgeois' car collision] From French Revolutions to Gaullist weekends, freedom is violence.

  • Corinne: This isn't a novel, this is a film. A film is life.