Flashback: Weekend – Jean-Luc Godard’s assault on bourgeois values from 1967
Godard’s incendiary, nihilistic work doesn’t concern itself with narrative but, for those willing to invest the effort, it’s a rewarding, stimulating excursion
Sexual perversity, cannibalistic revolutionaries, random gun violence – it’s all there in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 assault on bourgeois values. Like the French director’s other films, this is more concerned with ideas and concepts than narrative and story. Although it’s more accessible than the difficult political essays, such as Joy of Learning (1969) and Number Two (1975), that followed, it’s still a demanding watch.
Those looking for an adventurous night’s viewing will nevertheless find it both edifying and intellectually stimulating. Weekend is chock-a-block with thoughts and observations, but it mainly concerns itself with three ideas close to the heart of the 1960s generation: materialist lifestyles, class politics and violent revolution.
Although Godard’s Marxist views had become explicit in his previous movie, La Chinoise (also 1967), Weekend is more a work of nihilism, as it takes a sledgehammer to the bourgeois view of society without suggesting any alternatives. But the main takeaway from the movie is more anthropological than political – that humankind is a brutal, self-serving species whose violent nature is only kept in check by the social constructs we place upon ourselves.