Word: godard
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...Jean-Luc Godard once dedicated a film to him. London's National Film Theater has held a retrospective season of his work. Critics have ranked him with Hawks and Hitchcock for his economic style and strong sense of form. Yet to the average moviegoer, the name of Director Donald Siegel means no more than the brand of popcorn on sale in the lobby...
WEEKEND. Jean-Luc Godard's savage attack on bourgeois society opens with satirical brilliance, then degenerates into dreary political rhetoric...
...moving toward a mode of indecision, a non-judging, antiabsolutist, amoral, particularized view of life in which no form the species can take is not somehow acceptable and in which the artist's aim is to become rather than to judge the other. The mode of Joyce, Sartre, Godard, drugtakers and anarchists, it excludes sexual stereotyping and indeed is a feminine mode in that it shuns ethical sweep for the underside of life that women have always been relegated to. (In contrast is the masculine, decisive mode of someone like Mailer, who emphasizes the battle of the ego with reality...
...this is amply demonstrated in Weekend, Godard's latest diatribe against the bourgeois world. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (TIME, Sept. 27) saw modern society as a big brothel. Weekend sees it as a slaughterhouse. A couple (Mireille Dare and Jean Yanne) are embarking on a motor trip. On a narrow country road, they run into an interminable traffic jam. They inch past a line of strange highway flotsam, including a cage of circus animals and a sailboat on a trailer manned by a mariner in wet-weather gear. A few stalled cars honk furiously...
This chilling sequence-perhaps the finest single scene that Godard has ever filmed-is only the beginning. During the couple's repeatedly interrupted trip, which lasts for the rest of the movie, wrecked autos, hideously dismembered bodies and senseless violence meet them at every turn. There are a few irrelevant respites, such as a Mozart sonata on the sound track while the camera pans around a farm at sunset, and a couple of overlong political harangues on black revolution and the war in the Mid dle East. But always the film turns back to the violence-on the road...