Weekend (scA)
CINEMA
Mod apocalypse
JAMES PRICE
Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, which opened to ICA club members last week, is an activist film, a political as much as an artistic act, and it is useless to pass it off as superior entertain- ment.
The film opens in a smart apartment in a Paris suburb. A young woman (Mireille Darc) and I. 2r lover are plotting the death of her hus- band, while the husband (Jean Yanne) explains to his mistress over the telephone that his wife is getting suspicious at the repeated attempts on her life. But husband and wife have a common interest, which is to obtain their in- heritance from the wife's mother, and this has fo be accomplished first. In a shadowy room the girl sits on a table in her underclothes and tells her lover about a triangular orgy in which a man breaks eggs between her thighs and forces her to excrete in a bowl of milk.
Husband and wife set off for the coun- try, and we have the celebrated nine-minute -tracking shot. To the accompaniment of motor horns and phrases of Bernard Herrmann's music for Psycho their Facel edges its way past a queue of stationary vehicles, their owners tinkering under the bonnet, playing games, pic- nicking and squabbling, to find at the head an obscene litter of blood, bodies and wrecked cars. As their journey continues the country- side becomes a graveyard of crashed cars and corpses, to all of which they react with indif- ference. When they lose their own car in a burning shambles (the girl screaming 'My new handbag!') they continue on foot, pilgrims through a green and fertile land, despoiling corpses, meeting strange people, until they reach Oinville and the mother's house. They hack her to death with a butcher's knife, afterwards faking it as an elaborate accident involv-
ing two cars, an aeroplane and a• tree.
On the road once more they are captured, together with some English tourists, by hippies, an organisation called the FLSO (Seine et Oise Liberation Front). The man tries to escape, and is killed. One of the girl tourists is ceremonially raped by a cook in a bloodstained smock; echo- ing the obscenities of the anecdote at the start of the film he breaks eggs over her and stuffs her with a fish. A pig is slaughtered; a goose is decapitated. In the last scene our femme mariee, now an accepted hippy, is eating a stew of pork, tourist and her husband. 11 faut de- passer l'horreur de la bourgeoisie par plus d'horreur encore,' one of her new companions says.
Godard's attack is on Western materialism, which also means his once-loved America. Hus- band and wife share the same consumer-society desires: a winter in Mexico, a weekend with James Bond. The husband is told by a miracle- working hitch-hiker that he looks like something out of Reader's Digest. Two things drive him to a frenzy : other users of the road, whom he drives into the ditch whenever possible, and people who don't give material information. Abstract and philosophic knowledge is repre- sented by Emily Bronte disguised as Alice; they meet her in a wood accompanied by a creature with slogans pinned to his clothing, and when she fails to direct them to Oinville the husband sets light to her; she burns like a napalm victim.
The dialectic requires a revolutionary state- ment. From Jean-Pierre Leaud in Napoleonic costume it gets a recital about man's failure to rise to revolutionary grandeur. From two dust- men, a negro and an Algerian (Laszlo Szabo, of Made in USA), it gets an uncompromising statement of anti-Western ends and means— revenge and destruction—but the declamatory way their lines are delivered, like Maoist slogans, makes Godard's position ambiguous. The third force in the film is the hippies; they are also Iroquois, a beautiful, forlorn race doomed to extinction; their lives contain poetry and music, but they are over the edge of sanity, into a twilight world of strange, bloody rites and secret codes.
Following La Chinoise and Far from Viet- nam, Godard's new film is a further expression of his need to act, in terms of cinema, in the face of what he sees as Western greed and violence. It shocks and repels, and it does so designedly; it's an individual matter whether one feels the whole thing is justified or not. I'm not at all sure that the film as a whole is not an invitation to- pick up one's guns and certainly its forecasting of the event in Paris this May is unmistakable. In the enc therefore, since Godard insists on our either re jecting Western civilisation or rejecting his filn I am bound to decide against the film. But I d, so with the uneasy feeling that time is going to improve one's understanding of it, and that i: may indeed turn out to be his masterpiece.
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