Weekend

Saw Weekend (the Godard one, not the gay one.) Well, no sooner am I whining about Godard being boring and tedious than he is taking aim square at my self-satisfied burgeoning yuppie-hood. This film stars a middle-class couple trying to get to the wife's father before he dies. This film makes the subsumed passive aggression of polite society into full-blown aggression. The film opens with them serenely regarding some road-rage taking place outside their house: two men get in a near collision. One tries to drive off, only to be stopped by the other man. They start fighting. The other man tries to get a tire-iron, but the first man's wife is faster. En route, she dumps his briefcase on the ground. The situation just escalates.

The entire film is fairly unpleasant. At last, it seems, I've found the source of studio Troma's and Harmony Korine's aggressive snottiness. Car horns are perpetually honking for the first half of the films, only to give way to the drone of airplane engines and gun-fire. The visual aesthetic is lo-fi and grungy. This mixed with increasing amounts of guerilla fighters reminds me strongly of Sleeping Dogs (which post-dates this film by a decade.) At one point violent political rhetoric is linked to pornography. This link is subversive but also apt.

The central couple are dumped on pretty hard. They're constantly revealed to be stupid, self-serving, and barbaric. They're hurrying to the wife's father, for example, only to ensure their inheritance. At one point God himself hitches a ride in their car and offers to grant them wishes. When they wish for blond hair and a fleet of bentleys, he calls them selfish and stupid before leaving them. Later on, the husband looks on, indifferently, as his wife is raped. The only time we hear the couple say "I love you" is when we are looking at a close-up shot of a skinned rabbit's face which is being soaked in waves of blood. The couple are planning a murder at the time (of course.) There's a scene where a garbage man is reading from some sociopolitical book about the inhuman barbarity of modern civilization. The bored faces of the central couple say it all.

This is a common theme in 60s/70s cinema, that of the evil-minded modern man, but this film feels definitive. It even hat-tips Luis Buñuel who would go on to produce the identically-themed Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. This is a smart, obnoxious, challenging, artful film which I'm glad I saw and do not want to have to suffer through again.