A DVD Review of Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend"
Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most maddening auteurs in film history. A founding member of the French New Wave, his first film, the incredibly influential “Breathless,” was a playful and beautiful riff on the film noir and gangster film. However, as his career progressed, Godard’s work became increasingly cerebral, intertwined in a web of intertextuality, politics, and attempts to revolutionize cinema along with the world. While many of these films are incredible, most of them are also equally frustrating and motivating.
“Weekend” begins with an incredibly shallow bourgeois couple that decides to murder the wife’s father for his money while going on a weekend holiday that, amongst other things, is made up of traffic jams (one of Godard’s most incredible shots is a ten-minute tracking shot of the congestion), dead bodies, and cannibals. After all, Godard is not the most subtle of directors. In his brilliant “Band of Outsiders,” Godard’s characters decide to be silence for a minute and he literally eliminates the audio track completely for the duration. What he is aiming at with “Weekend” is a strong critique of capitalist society, especially the bourgeois, and if that was not apparent in his treatment of his characters, it quickly comes to the forefront in a scene in which the rich woman is anguished screaming around her burning car and cries out “My Hermes handbag!”
While “Weekend” is more of an intellectual experience than his earlier works, it is still a gem of the cinephile’s cinema and it is applauded that it has finally made its way to DVD. New Yorker’s edition, while not nearly as comprehensive as Criterion’s efforts, stands above Fox Lorber’s dreadful treatments. New Yorker’s image and audio transfers aren’t perfect, especially the subtitle track that misses some of Godard’s intertitles, and there has been some debate about the splicing of a jump-cut during the car crash infringing on Godard’s original editorial techniques (see Slant Magazine’s review).
However, New Yorker has supplied the film with two interviews: one by Godard’s cinematographer, the legendary Raoul Coutard, and the other by filmmaker Mike Figgis, and a commentary by David Sterritt, which, of course, is better than nothing. As with most of these New Wave films on DVD, the main attraction and, in turn, main reason to buy or rent this DVD is for the film itself, which is wonderfully frustrating.
Just don’t expect to be a passive viewer during Godard’s fin de cinema.
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