Weekend

My favourite Godard film … possibly. I will have to rewatch The Image Book but when Godard goes surreal or abstract he just hits my brain in the right places.

I could try go into it more but I frankly won’t do it justice, all I’ll say is I wish more directors were as aggressive with a point as this.

My favourite Godard film … possibly. I will have to rewatch The Image Book but when Godard goes surreal or abstract he just hits my brain in the right places.

I could try go into it more but I frankly won’t do it justice, all I’ll say is I wish more directors were as aggressive with a point as this.

A master in surrealism and satire excellence. I initially expected a humorous parody of the bourgeois society and a dramatised depiction of the price of vanity and greed. however I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was so much more. it explored a world where political radicalism infiltrated everything, leaving an apocalyptic and violent earth. it poked fun at communism and other beliefs in a tasteful yet unique fashion.

Beyond the vast amount of themes portrays, so many sequences within this film was so visually enticing and attached layers to the narrative while also pushing the satirical tone further.

I genuinely loved this so so much!!! Enjoyment wise I would easily give this a 5 stars however the animal cruelty made it not worthy of that.

A master in surrealism and satire excellence. I initially expected a humorous parody of the bourgeois society and a dramatised depiction of the price of vanity and greed. however I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was so much more. it explored a world where political radicalism infiltrated everything, leaving an apocalyptic and violent earth. it poked fun at communism and other beliefs in a tasteful yet unique fashion.

Beyond the vast amount of themes portrays, so many sequences within this film was so visually enticing and attached layers to the narrative while also pushing the satirical tone further.

I genuinely loved this so so much!!! Enjoyment wise I would easily give this a 5 stars however the animal cruelty made it not worthy of that.

The first half is a sharp, an unsettling look at societal decay, but the second half abandons structure for pure chaos. There are some genuinely brilliant ideas here, especially in how the film suggests that society acts as a mask, suppressing people’s primal desires, and once that mask breaks, so does any sense of sanity. I think the ideas are compelling, but the execution falls apart in the last half hour.

The first half is a sharp, an unsettling look at societal decay, but the second half abandons structure for pure chaos. There are some genuinely brilliant ideas here, especially in how the film suggests that society acts as a mask, suppressing people’s primal desires, and once that mask breaks, so does any sense of sanity. I think the ideas are compelling, but the execution falls apart in the last half hour.

Its actual critique of bourgeois culture is a bit plain, the bourgeoisie are greedy and cruel and stupid, but it is able to elevate this eloquent simplicity through it's many excellent images. The long takes and popping colours bring out the best in it's gruesome car crashes and other horrors.

Its actual critique of bourgeois culture is a bit plain, the bourgeoisie are greedy and cruel and stupid, but it is able to elevate this eloquent simplicity through it's many excellent images. The long takes and popping colours bring out the best in it's gruesome car crashes and other horrors.

My Criterion Challenge 2026

Challenge #31: Watch a film rated 3.7 stars

This feels like if you mixed Linklater’s Waking Life with the opening hour of Beau Is Afraid and the socio-political urgency of a Spike Lee film and shook it up in a classic stereotypical New Wave blender.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend was a tough one for me, placed firmly in my mental category of “films I’m probably too undereducated to fully connect with.”

I’m a JLG fan by nature (I was born this way), but notably this film marked a bit of a shift in his filmmaking style—a style that, also by nature, I buck against. The films from Weekend to Tout Va Bien represent Godard’s pivot to films that feature primarily cinematic illusion and abstraction. He was said to be getting fed up with the classic ideas of what movies were meant to look and sound like, and the films that followed Weekend (like Weekend itself) were more like colorful, ideologically dense, narratively loose political lectures.

Weekend feels like a gradual evolution into this new mode/chapter of JLG’s career. We have a pretty clear-cut A to B narrative (a couple of lovers driving to the woman’s parents' house with the intention of collecting an inheritance) but alongthe way we’re interrupted by an Alice In Wonderland-esque mosaic of side characters and tangents—some of which are engaging and some of which are tiresome.

I always find it, at leat in part, enjoyable to watch a filmmaker play with the form of filmmaking, even if that playfulness veers into annoyance. His insistence on having an extended dolly shot of the lovers bullying their way past a traffic jam, overloading it with a bombardment of horns honking, did make me turn the sound down on my TV and say, “Alright, Jean-Luc, did you really have to do that?”

There are other times when the playfulness was welcome, like having onlookers gaze into the camera while the tractor driver and the woman are arguing about who had the right-of-way while her boyfriend bleeds out in the front seat—a sequence that HAD to influence Spike Lee.

I would say much of this film outstays it’s welcome, though and, to circle back, left me scratching my head, self-aware (and self-conscious) of my own intellectual/political limitations. By dropping you into this Beau Is Afraid-esque world, JLG is commenting—based on what I’ve read—on the unraveling of “Rousseau’s social contract and points to an inevitable disintegration into tribal atavism.” Which is to highlight that this is a film will be tricky to latch onto if you’re not someone in tune with the socio-political climate of France (or the world) in the late 1960s—if words like Marxism or Leninism or names like Jacques Lacan are deterents, rather than invitations.

This is such an expansive film that, by nature, I’m wont to praise it for audacity alone (and that’s probably reflected in my Letterboxd star rating), but as an experience, I did find it just teetering over the edge of frustration, boredom, and abstraction. It felt a little “inside baseball” for concepts and intellectual engagement. You might even breeze past the parody of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (like I did) in the opening when Corinne describes the three-way she had. I wouldn’t have made that connection unless, A: I had recently seen Persona or B: had a Criterion essay to read shortly after watching. (Ultimately, B was the saving grace with this film for me.)

There is no doubt a lot to “unpack” with this film, and nearly endless literature to read as homework if you’re someone who likes your films to require a supplemental reading list. I am of the disposition that I may prefer my films to be accessible in a way this film rarely was.

So anyway, Weekend didn’t fully work for me, but it’s visually and auditorally inventive/creative enough that it didn’t completely push me away. I mentioned Waking Life as a comp (similarly, maybe Slacker if there was a singular set of protagonists we follow around Austin) and that anthological nature is perfect for keeping a film dynamic and alive (which this film pretty much always is). But the discomfort unfortunately won out, and when the final FIN popped on the screen, I promptly stood up off my couch and said, “Alright, cool,” before moving on with my life.

6.4/10

My Criterion Challenge 2026

Challenge #31: Watch a film rated 3.7 stars

This feels like if you mixed Linklater’s Waking Life with the opening hour of Beau Is Afraid and the socio-political urgency of a Spike Lee film and shook it up in a classic stereotypical New Wave blender.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend was a tough one for me, placed firmly in my mental category of “films I’m probably too undereducated to fully connect with.”

I’m a JLG fan by nature (I was born this way), but notably this film marked a bit of a shift in his filmmaking style—a style that, also by nature, I buck against. The films from Weekend to Tout Va Bien represent Godard’s pivot to films that feature primarily cinematic illusion and abstraction. He was said to be getting fed up with the classic ideas of what movies were meant to look and sound like, and the films that followed Weekend (like Weekend itself) were more like colorful, ideologically dense, narratively loose political lectures.

Weekend feels like a gradual evolution into this new mode/chapter of JLG’s career. We have a pretty clear-cut A to B narrative (a couple of lovers driving to the woman’s parents' house with the intention of collecting an inheritance) but alongthe way we’re interrupted by an Alice In Wonderland-esque mosaic of side characters and tangents—some of which are engaging and some of which are tiresome.

I always find it, at leat in part, enjoyable to watch a filmmaker play with the form of filmmaking, even if that playfulness veers into annoyance. His insistence on having an extended dolly shot of the lovers bullying their way past a traffic jam, overloading it with a bombardment of horns honking, did make me turn the sound down on my TV and say, “Alright, Jean-Luc, did you really have to do that?”

There are other times when the playfulness was welcome, like having onlookers gaze into the camera while the tractor driver and the woman are arguing about who had the right-of-way while her boyfriend bleeds out in the front seat—a sequence that HAD to influence Spike Lee.

I would say much of this film outstays it’s welcome, though and, to circle back, left me scratching my head, self-aware (and self-conscious) of my own intellectual/political limitations. By dropping you into this Beau Is Afraid-esque world, JLG is commenting—based on what I’ve read—on the unraveling of “Rousseau’s social contract and points to an inevitable disintegration into tribal atavism.” Which is to highlight that this is a film will be tricky to latch onto if you’re not someone in tune with the socio-political climate of France (or the world) in the late 1960s—if words like Marxism or Leninism or names like Jacques Lacan are deterents, rather than invitations.

This is such an expansive film that, by nature, I’m wont to praise it for audacity alone (and that’s probably reflected in my Letterboxd star rating), but as an experience, I did find it just teetering over the edge of frustration, boredom, and abstraction. It felt a little “inside baseball” for concepts and intellectual engagement. You might even breeze past the parody of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (like I did) in the opening when Corinne describes the three-way she had. I wouldn’t have made that connection unless, A: I had recently seen Persona or B: had a Criterion essay to read shortly after watching. (Ultimately, B was the saving grace with this film for me.)

There is no doubt a lot to “unpack” with this film, and nearly endless literature to read as homework if you’re someone who likes your films to require a supplemental reading list. I am of the disposition that I may prefer my films to be accessible in a way this film rarely was.

So anyway, Weekend didn’t fully work for me, but it’s visually and auditorally inventive/creative enough that it didn’t completely push me away. I mentioned Waking Life as a comp (similarly, maybe Slacker if there was a singular set of protagonists we follow around Austin) and that anthological nature is perfect for keeping a film dynamic and alive (which this film pretty much always is). But the discomfort unfortunately won out, and when the final FIN popped on the screen, I promptly stood up off my couch and said, “Alright, cool,” before moving on with my life.

6.4/10