Among the world's masterpieces of misanthropy, Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 opus follows a loathsome, greedy, sexually perverse bourgeois married couple on a weekend jaunt into the French countryside during which they plan to murder the wife's dying father, and then, perhaps, turn viciously on each other. Instead, they crash land in a surrealist, timeless terrain of weirdo historic figures (Saint-Just, Emily Brönte, Tom Thumb, etc.), cannibalistic hippie terrorists, didactic Algerian revolutionaries, and an impossible traffic jam which motivates a Godard eight-minute tracking shot, assuring that the audience be tortured by its maddening monotony. An arthouse divider: some find Weekend similar to the works of Artaud, De Sade, and Buñuel — oddly liberating and strangely funny; others dismiss it as an offensive, mean-spirited assault not only on Western civilization but on anyone who buys a ticket to see it. Almost 45 years after its release, Weekend is as lethal as ever!
