“What’s going on? It’s as bad as life.”
These are the words of Roger Ebert, finishing off his review of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend (Ebert). It’s a fair conclusion; Weekend is a frenzied hour and a half of betrayal, death, and vehicular chaos, following murderous couple Corinne and Roland on a plot to take a shortcut on the path to inheritance. Motorists scream at one another, carcasses of sedans litter the landscape, blood stains the roads, and no one seems to care. And while Godard himself will tell you that Weekend is “a film found in the trash”, it has since become a staple in the French director’s catalog. To understand why and how Weekend has come to be viewed this way, we have to hop back a few decades and put ourselves in the shoes of critics watching the film at its release.
Weekend, while filled with violence that shocked many American audiences—and alienated some who did not consider themselves part of the fandom the director enjoyed in the 1960s—found a warm reception with critics in the U.S. and U.K. that had been properly introduced to Godard’s style through the success of his earlier work. The anti-cinema qualities of the film were revered as revolutionary, and contributed to the conception of Godard as a singular, independent auteur. French critics, on the other hand, were more familiar with both the director’s work and the stylistic contexts in which the film operated, leading to more nuanced discussion of the film compared to their counterparts abroad. By first analyzing the trends within American and British reviews of Weekend and then moving into more detailed discussion of French criticism, I aim to illustrate the differences between the film’s domestic and international reception, hopefully providing some insight as to the status of film criticism in the late 1960s at home and abroad.
For many American critics, Weekend was yet another film affirming the authorial status of Godard; the brainchild of a singular, unique man, the only one who could make such a thing. Writing for the New York Times, Renata Adler lauded the film’s “grand” perception, attributing much of what she found admirable about the film to Godard and Godard alone. The director is constructed as some sort of superhuman who has “caught it [insanity] and turned it into one of the most important and difficult films he has ever made” (Adler 36). Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times had a similar focus on the man behind it all, constantly talking about his decisions: “Godard provides,” “Godard abandons”, “Godard places”… all culminating in the conception of a “new Godard universe.” Again and again, American and British reviewers—especially those writing for newspapers—put the spotlight on Godard. Across the Atlantic, Barry Norman called Weekend a “personal statement”, and in one of the most extreme affirmations of auteurship, asserted that “Mireille Dare and Jean Yanne are the chief actors; Godard is the star” (Norman 12).
While in a less intense fashion than the average newspaper review, Jan Dawson drew on similar ideas in their article for the film-focused publication Sight & Sound. Weekend is in part described as an assault by Godard on his audience, echoing the sentiment that the film is completely his (Dawson 151). The Independent Film Journal called it “Godard’s angry, obsessive vision of the modern world” (“Weekend” 894). Even trade journals like Boxoffice and Variety leaned into Godard’s presence. The former, like Norman, positioned Godard as the chief actor of the film, while Variety chose to refer to the work as the director’s personal viewpoint (“Weekend” 10, “Le Weekend” 6). It seems that the mythos surrounding Godard was present regardless of the intended audience. This did not go without notice; it is worth mentioning that Variety’s review is a bit tongue-in-cheek, referring to the Frenchman as the “enfant terrible” of French cinema.
In fact, much of Weekend’s negative reception (though, admittedly, little seems to exist) is imbued with a distaste for these descriptions of Godard. Charles Champlin of the LA Times, who detested the film, denounced the “unequivocal devotees of Monsieur Godard” (Champlin 18). Yet even in reviews like these, there is a certain respect for Godard. If his status is to be criticized, it is not that he does not deserve it. Rather, Weekend itself failed to live up to the expectations some had for the director. While few considered Weekend to be a bad film, there was a shared sentiment that the film regresses as it enters the second half of its runtime. Norman opined that the ending falls short of the masterpiece promised by the first half; The Independent Film Journal went further to say that Godard risks losing his audience completely in the last hour. Ebert and Adler were not fans of the direct-address monologues that call for revolutionary action at the end, with Adler declaring that they’re worth walking out for.
The shock factor of Weekend—no small one, given the abundance of depravity—was generally either interpreted as a cerebral commentary on human nature or, to once again quote Champlin, “a shrill, demented, fatuous, tedious, arrogant, stomach-turning public exercise in self-abuse”. For Adler, the chaos achieved throughout was the mark of a visionary. Likewise for Ebert, who viewed the film as “revolutionary”. Discussion of Weekend’s anti-cinema qualities is a common thread between many reviews. If one is to subscribe to the theory of Godard as auteur, then Weekend is a daring work whose experimental qualities are so inventive that they require extensive praise. Or perhaps it is the work of a “naughty adolescent”, proof that every director has one atrocious movie in them (per, as you may guess, Champlin).
Lacking from many a review is an extensive stylistic analysis of the film. Of course, few could resist mentioning the famous traffic jam shot (apparently directed by Godard’s fake-blood stained hands), though none could seem to agree on how long it was; five minutes per Norman, Dawson says seventeen. Temporal contradictions aside, all agreed that it was a demonstration of technical brilliance, one of the best shots of Godard’s career and destined to become a “cinema classic”. But as far as American or British criticism goes, that is the end of the conversation on the style of Weekend. There is nothing on the film’s vibrant use of primary colors. The same goes for the occasionally ridiculous acting style of Dare and Yanne (though their performances were generally well-received). Also rare are mentions of the bizarre historical characters the murderous couple encounter on their adventures. Instead, critics opt for a few sentences on the characters themselves; everyone in Weekend is horrible. What they do to others and what is done unto them has little effect; there is a collective acknowledgement of a lack of morality of the star couple, but not much expansion upon what that may signify.
Weekend is often thought of as the start of Godard’s political phase. Some critics found the film’s social commentary to be notable and worth expanding upon; others, like Norman, were content to call it a “brilliant” commentary on “modern times”. Ebert, in perhaps the most theoretically sound American review, interprets Weekend as a pointed commentary on “violence, hatred, [and] the end of ideology”; nobody cares what happens to anyone else, and that indifference is how one finds themselves in a countryside with corpses at every turn. Per Ebert, Godard’s satire is filled with intention, shutting down any “optimistic liberal solutions” to the hellscape of Weekend’s world. The lessons of Emily Brontë will not save us, nor will educating the masses; as if to dismiss Deweyan pragmatism, “culture is brought to the masses” as a pianist plays for a small farming town. Nobody cares, the couple moves on, the atrocities continue. Beyond Ebert’s review, little is said beyond recognizing that the film is anti-status quo. Craig Joseph Fischer attributes this lack of political discussion to the marketing and exhibition tactics applied to the film in the United States; Weekend did not succeed outside of the art-house market, reviewers focused on “auteuristic and aesthetic” evaluation, and distributors tended to promote Godard’s work for its sexual, shocking content. Any potential strong reaction to the film’s political elements was stifled by the way it was released (Fischer 10).
Across the Atlantic, critics and audiences alike needed no introduction to Godard. The French were well-versed in the work of their homegrown “enfant terrible” and the cultural context of his work. There is no better demonstration of this than the writing featured in long-running film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, the intellectual powerhouse that succeeded early 1900s publication Revue de Cinéma. Two essays featured in the 199th issue analyze Weekend (stylized Week-end for French release) to a greater theoretical depth than anything published in English; while not exactly newspaper reviews, they come from a crucial source of French film criticism. The first, “L’étang moderne” written by Jacques Aumont, contains an interesting section on camera movement. Per Aumont, Godard’s use of camera movement serves to remind the viewer of its presence, separating the spectator from the film (Aumont 59). This is a view shared by Jean Collet, writer of the second essay “Le dur silence des galaxies”. Collet mentions the early scene where Corinne describes her sexual exploits: here, the camera constantly zooms in and out, reminding the viewer that their experience is constantly mediated by the hand of the director (Collet 60).
This scene is also the subject of thematic and narrative analysis by Collet. In talking about her past lovers, says Collet, Corinne removes her attachment to them; in a way, she kills them. Ties removed, she can properly project her desires onto another person. The ending scene, then, brings this idea full circle; her husband is dead, both in her mind and in real life, and in Corinne’s final act of removing her attachment to him, he is figuratively and literally consumed. In contrast with American critics, Collet considered the end of the film to be a narrative feat, tying together the dichotomies of barbarism and eroticism, desire and consumption, death and survival, and patience and violence.
Both critics interpret Weekend as an assortment of fragments, pieces of a broken film that the audience must put together. Aumont proposed that the film could be interpreted as a symbolic representation of war in 1967: Corinne and Roland find themselves walking around like survivors of Hiroshima, while the FLSO evokes the FLN (the Front de Liberation Nationale who fought for Algeria’s independence from France). Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the interpretations put forth in Cahiers, the criticism presented in the magazine engages more thoroughly with film theory and history than just about anything published in America or the UK. Aumont even mentions the film’s approach to color, a notable trait but never discussed in English publications. Inherent to both essays is a respect for Godard’s work. Each author praises the director’s narrative and technical capabilities; after all, it would be difficult to engage in such thorough analysis of a film if it did not have much to offer. Collet’s final line properly sums up Cahiers’ attitude toward the film: it is “a nameless object capable, for those who know how to read, of telling the story of the world of the past and what is to come”.
In direct contrast to Cahiers, Louis Seguin’s review of Weekend for film publication Positif is perhaps one of the most intensely negative reviews of a film ever published. Three pages (plenty of room) of absolutely scathing condemnation, including an oh-so-French declaration that any critic, upon watching Weekend, will eventually reach the day “where the richest dictionaries of synonyms and the best possible analogical lexicon will reach their limits and the critic, exhausted, will run out of insults’’ (Seguin 39). The traffic jam scene, for many a grand achievement, is in Seguin’s opinion not proof of an expansive imagination or a particularly well-executed shot; in fact, he doubts that it’s even longer than the camera movement of Kanal. The deification of Godard so common to American writers has no place here. The aforementioned piano shot is owed not to the eye of Godard; it is the steady hand of the cameraman that makes it possible. While Seguin is highly critical, there are few cheap shots; it is clear that he is well-acquainted with French film and the medium in general (nobody in America was calling Godard’s approach “sous-Gourguet and pseudo-Berthomieu”).
Fernand Dufour, writing for the magazine Cinéma, put out a review a bit more accessible than the aforementioned articles. Like his peers, much of his review is dedicated to Godard’s narrative and stylistic decisions. Central to his analysis is the idea of “automobility”, that getting behind the wheel exposes man’s worst qualities: egoism, rudeness, violence, et cetera (Dufour 94). Dufour considered the film to be an outcry on Godard’s part against apathy and spinelessness, a direct testimony to try and prevent French society from devolving into the world of Corinne and Roland. The use of animal blood in the second half is highlighted as having a traumatizing physical presence on the screen; while Dufour acknowledges the same shock tactics so notable to American critics, they are not at the center of his review. The direct addresses that were so intolerable to Adler and Ebert are, for Dufour, a fascinating moment: the constant chewing paired with a completely static camera “bursts the screen”, at once giving the scene a very human quality while evoking a “methodical grinder” that the viewer feels powerless to control. Yet there are commonalities: like Ebert, Dufour interprets the piano-playing scene as a commentary on the willful ignorance of the masses.
Close examination of Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, and Cinéma reveals a dimension to French criticism that American and British reviewers did not engage in: thorough, insightful analysis of style and narrative. Whether one associates this difference to the capabilities of the critics or the amount of space they had to work with, it serves as strong evidence that French film culture was far more equipped to deal with a film like Weekend; there was a demand for lengthy, high-level film criticism and writers willing to step up to the plate. This is not to say that every single French reviewer had their nose in the air, referencing Bergman and chaining semicolons together for half a page. French newspaper Le Monde’s review is much closer to Adler than Collet and Aumont, with references to Weekend’s “image-choc” (shock-image) and Godard’s general denouncing of modern society (de Baroncelli 15). It is worth noting that while most French critics engaged to some degree with the film’s political messaging, few chose to make it the center of their writing, at least not immediately following its release.
Weekend is not an easy film. From start to end, we are witness to terrible people doing terrible things. Corinne and Roland, who we are forced to spend the entire film with, are despicable. There is no moral code, there are no heroes. In creating Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard had no interest in creating an enjoyable film-going experience. That such a film found such warm reception both domestically and overseas is remarkable, and a testament to the faith international critics had in Godard’s creative abilities. And even if I find myself closer to Seguin than Ebert in my opinions on the film, I cannot ignore the technical and narrative brilliance that so many critics have highlighted in Weekend. Perhaps it was a film once found in the trash, but—thankfully—it has been plucked out, dusted off, and appreciated for what it is: a thrilling, revolutionary, essential moment in the rich history of film in France.
Works Cited
Ebert, Roger. “Weekend Movie Review & Film Summary (1968) | Roger Ebert.” Https://Www.Rogerebert.Com/, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/Weekend-1968. Accessed 1 May 2023.
Adler, Renata. “Film Festival: ‘Weekend.’” The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1968, p. 36.
Norman, Barry. “Film.” Daily Mail, no. 22448, 4 July 1968, p. 12. Daily Mail Historical Archive.
Dawson, Jan. “Film Reviews: Week-End.” Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 37, no. 3, Summer 1968, p. 151.
“Current Film Reviews: Weekend.” The Independent Film Journal (Archive: 1937-1979), vol. 62, no. 11, 29 Oct. 1968, p. 894.
“FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEATURE REVIEWS: Weekend.” Boxoffice., vol. 94, no. 3, 4 Nov. 1968, p. a10.
“Film Review: Le Weekend.” Variety (Archive: 1905-2000), vol. 249, no. 8, 10 Jan. 1968, pp. 6, 20.
Champlin, Charles. “MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Weekend’ Opens at the Los Feliz.” Los Angeles Times (1923-1995), 26 Dec. 1968, p. g18.
Fischer, Craig Joseph. “Films Lost in the Cosmos: Radicalism and the Reception of Jean-Luc Godard’s Movies.” ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/docview/304445634/abstract/D2650152F89B4214PQ/1.
Aumont, Jacques. “L’étang moderne.” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 199, March 1968, p. 59.
Collet, Jean. “Le dur silence des galaxies.” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 199, March 1968, p. 60.
Seguin, Louis. “Trouvé, certes, mais ou?” Positif, no. 93, March 1968, p. 39-42.
Dufour, Fernand. “Week-end: Un utile exercice de liberté.” Cinéma, no. 126, May 1968, p. 94.
de Baroncelli, Jean. “LES SPECTACLES: « WEEK-END », de Godard.” Le Monde (1944-2000), 31 Dec. 1967, p. 15.