Final Review Of ‘Weekend’

I read this overall review about the film ‘Weekend’ and it pretty much said everything that i learnt about, Although this is from an extract it is really clear on what Godard achieved in making this film.

Weekend is perhaps the most problematic film of the modern cinema’s most problematic (if arguably most important) filmmaker. The problem lies partly in the complexity of the issues involved. There are the difficulties of the film itself, difficulties of obscurity in meaning, but also those arising from the nature of its radicalism, plus the wider difficulties concerning the whole 20th-century political and aesthetic debate centered on “realism” vs. “modernism.”

Weekend is a film towards which, as time passes, one feels increasingly less indulgent. When it appeared (after the events of May ’68, but made before them), it seemed uncannily prescient, its formal, aesthetic, and political anarchism exhilarating and liberating. Yet there were always doubts—an uneasiness, a squeamishness , which the film itself seemed to define as “bourgeois,” and scoffed at one for feeling. Clearly in intention it is a film about the brutalization of contemporary capitalist society, but it is also in effect a brutalizing film. This becomes explicit in one of its final statements, where we are told that the horror of the bourgeoisie must be countered with even greater horror.

In practice, the results of the theoretical argument outlined here became increasingly ambiguous. The abdication from “authority” can be read as Godard’s somewhat disingenuous denial of responsibility, (” I am not making these statements, voices in the film are making them”—voices which Godard has chosen and permitted to speak). The overthrow of “realism” (the blood is obviously red paint, the film is a film) becomes a means of allowing us to find degradation (especially of women), slaughter and cannibalism funny . One cannot resist the suggestion that Godard is using revolutionary politics as an excuse for indulging a number of very unpleasant fantasies of sexuality and violence.

References

http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Vi-Wi/Le-Weekend.html