Weekend

1967 1h 44m FR

👍

6.9

SOLID

★6.9TMDB · 318

Comedy

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

“Some stories are better left unspoiled.”

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Cast

Mireille Darc
Corinne Durand
Jean Yanne
Roland Durand
Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Le Chef du Front de Libération de la Seine et Oise
Yves Afonso
Gros Poucet (uncredited)
Yves Beneyton
Un Membre du FLSO (uncredited)
Juliet Berto
Une Activiste du FLSO / Jeune Bourgeoise Accidentée (uncredited)
Michèle Breton
Girl in the Woods (uncredited)
Michel Cournot
Man From Farmyard (uncredited)

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Julio Cortázar, Jean-Luc Godard
Languages: French
Countries: France, Italy

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

MONEY

Did you know

Shot for just $0.3M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

ERA

Did you know

59 years old — a genuine piece of film history.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

WORLD

Did you know

International production across 2 countries: France, Italy.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, shot by Raoul Coutard. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by Antoine Duhamel. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Agnès Guillemot shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne and Jean-Pierre Kalfon carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt0062480 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Jean-Luc Godard directs. Raoul Coutard behind the camera. Antoine Duhamel scores. Agnès Guillemot cuts. Produced in France, Italy. Dialogue in French.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

1Shot for just $0.3M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.
259 years old — a genuine piece of film history.
3International production across 2 countries: France, Italy.
4Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, shot by Raoul Coutard. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
5Original score by Antoine Duhamel. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
6Editor Agnès Guillemot shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
7Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne and Jean-Pierre Kalfon carry the top of the cast.
8IMDB entry: tt0062480 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
9Released under 17 different titles around the world.

The technical file

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Original score: Antoine Duhamel
Editing: Agnès Guillemot
Runtime: 104 min · 1h 44m
Aspect ratio (typical): 1.37:1 (Academy)
Status: Released
Budget: $250,000
Original language: FR
Certification (US): R
IMDB: Weekend (1967)

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Jean-Luc Godard

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Community reviews

What people are saying

CRCulver2018-05-27
★ 10/10
As the 1960s went on Jean-Luc Godard kept up the kind of brash, zany, experimental style with which he made his name and became a cornerstone of the French New Wave, but his work increasingly showed a political consciousness sparked by the explosion of the consumer society in that decade. The class of haves, in his view, were being increasingly selfish and dog-eat-dog, while the have-nots of the world could not be expected to stand by idly. Society was surely headed for a breakdown, and his 1967 film WEEKEND is an absurdist vision of it in one hour and forty-five minutes. This is emphatically not a good entry point to Godard -- if you don't know his work, see Breathless or Le Mepris first -- but it is a marvelous capstone to his first decade of cinema. (After this, Godard disappeared from the limelight for some years while making more overtly political films with Jean-Pierre Gorin as the Dziga Vertov collective.) Married couple Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) set off from Paris one weekend for Corinne's parents' home, as her father is dying and they want to make sure they get their cut of inheritance. Not only is their relationship with Corinne's parents focused solely on money, but both Roland and Corinne are secretly having affairs and each plans to later dispose of the other in order to run away with their lovers. As Roland and Corinne hit the road, civilization appears to have vanished all around them: people are violently fighting each other over petty arguments, the road out of Paris is an endless traffic jam of honking horns and yelling, and the roadside is littered with car wrecks and their bloody victims. WEEKEND is a grand portrait of human veniality like Dante's INFERNO. Even when Corinne and Roland encounter a group of hippies, the idealistic dreamers who oppose the cruel order of capitalist society, they are shown great cruelty. Godard was awfully prescient: not only did he shoot this film a year before the events of May 1968 and he presaged a youth revolt, but he also expected that youth to perpetuate the same flaws of the system they overthrew. Visually, WEEKEND is as much a delight as any of Godard's other colour films of this time, with a pop art feel. Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard had a great eye for colour, mainly the red, white, and blue from the French flag, but all the hues on screen are bold and electric. A great treat for film aficionados are several long tracking shots that required great skill to shoot, such as the long traffic jam. There's a lot of poetry in the shots: I don't know why, but a long take where a pianist plays a Mozart suite to a crowd of farmers in a barnyard and Anne Wiazemsky (in a non-speaking role) walks up to listen, is as emotionally moving to me as anything from Tarkovsky. By this point Godard's films assume that the viewer is an intellectual, someone who has read a good bit of the literary canon and is aware of the political disputes not only of our time but also those reaching back to the 18th century. Thus as Corinne and Roland are wandering around lost around their own eventual car wreck, they come across the historical personage Saint-Just from the French Revolution (one of two amusing roles played here by the legendary Jean-Pierre Léaud), who absurdistly declaims from his writings while decked out in period costume. They then meet Tom Thumb and Emily Brontë. As the climax of the film approaches, two representatives of the Third World, African and Arab dustmen that our protagonists hitch a ride from, recite a revolutionary Marxist text at some length. And one scene where Corinne recounts a sexual encounter to her lover is a parody of Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA, which had come out the previous year. Criterion's re-release of WEEKEND on Blu-ray is a welcome event. The pop-art canvas of Godard's 1960s colour films comes through better in this higher-resolution format than on the old DVD releases. Criterion's extras are also enjoyable and informative. Viewers without a prior grounding in Godard's literary/political/social context will appreciate a 20-minute visual essay by Kent Jones which explains most of the references in the film, as well as some contemporary developments in Godard's life that aren't directly shown in the film, but made it what it is. There are interviews with the main actors from French television just before the film's 1968 release, and they explain how great it was to work with Godard, though one realizes that they hadn't seen the finished film and might well have been appalled at its anarchic pace and agitprop. The role of "making of" featurettes is provided by relatively recent interviews with cinematographer Raoul Coutard and assistant director Claude Miller.

Production companies