Week End
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Le weekend | |
 Film poster |
|
| Directed by | Jean-Luc Godard |
|---|---|
| Written by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Starring | Mireille Darc Jean Yanne |
| Music by | Antoine Duhamel |
| Cinematography | Raoul Coutard |
| Editing by | Agnès Guillemot |
| Distributed by | Athos Films |
| Release date(s) | December 29, 1967 |
| Running time | 105 min. |
| Language | French |
| Budget | $250,000 (estimated) |
Le weekend (1967) is a black comedy film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, both of whom were mainstream French TV stars. Jean-Pierre Léaud, iconic comic star of numerous French New Wave films including Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups (The Four Hundred Blows) and Godard's earlier Masculin, féminin, also appears in two roles. Raoul Coutard served as cinematographer.
The film was nominated for a Golden Bear at the 1968 Berlin International Film Festival [1] [2]
Contents |
[edit] Summary
A bourgeois French married couple, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc), both have secret lovers and are both planning each other's murder. They set out for her parents' home in the country to secure Corinne's inheritance, by murdering her father, if necessary. They find themselves on a chaotically picaresque car journey through a French countryside populated by increasingly bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents.
The film then becomes a series of vignettes involving class struggles to figures from literature and history, creating an overall impression of a humorous, beautiful, but also senseless and frightening world. Intertitles intrude suddenly to cut off the action. Near the beginning two pop up to let you know you're watching 'a film adrift in the cosmos' and then 'a film found on a scrap heap'.
Corinne and Roland do eventually arrive at her parents' place, days late, due to the various obstacles their journey's thrown up, only to find that her father has died and her mother is refusing them a share of the spoils. They kill her and set back off on the road, only to fall into the hands of a group of hippy cannibals, in whose encampment the film ends.
Cortázar's story "La Autopista del Sur" ("The Southern Thruway, 1966") supposedly influenced this film.
[edit] Context
Week-End came roughly at the end of an extraordinarily productive period for Godard in the sixties, during which he made at least two films a year. Radically leftist, he describes his output during this time as the angry rattling of a metal cup against the bars of his cell - and expresses his frustration that this elicited nothing but the banal approbation of the bourgeoisie.[citation needed]
[edit] Cast
- Mireille Darc as Corinne
- Jean Yanne as Roland
- Paul Gégauff as Pianist
- Jean-Pierre Léaud as Saint-Just
- Blandine Jeanson as Emily Brontë
- Yves Afonso as Tom Thumb
- Juliet Berto as The Radical
[edit] References
- ^ "18th Berlin International Film Festival". imdb.com. http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1968/01_jahresblatt_1968/01_Jahresblatt_1968.html. Retrieved on 2009-1-9.
- ^ "Awards for Week End". imdb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062480/awards. Retrieved on 2009-1-9.
[edit] External links
- Week End at the Internet Movie Database
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
