Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Every two months when the Cleveland Cinematheque's
printed schedule (on paper! Google it, kids) comes out, I await with some
trepidation program director John Ewing's sidebar essay. Ewing sometimes tells tales from behind the scenes that
make it sound like running a hip indie destination movie house is not always
fun. His latest describes an irate patron declaring she was done with the
Cinematheque because of its showing Jean-Luc Godard's WEEK-END, one of the
great transgressive features of French cinema.
Okay, here's where the Cleveland Movie Blog is partially
at fault. I should have had a review of WEEK-END posted in time to warn the
public, but somehow that title got past me. WEEK-END, from 1967, is a
nightmarish, angry, even proto-punk take on modern civilization, in which an
upscale French couple drive into the countryside for a weekend idyll,
only to get caught up in an endless one-lane traffic jam, sometimes with
burning vehicles and dead/dying bodies still lying around in a landscape of
industrial-nihilist horror. When they leave their vehicle, the protags somehow
get caught up in a kind of takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, except there's hints
of kinky sex. I forget how it ends. I'm not sure Godard was much into endings
at that stage. Yes, WEEK-END is not a crowd-pleaser. In fact, I can't even call
myself a complete fan of it; if you're not part of the beret-wearing,
gauloise-smoking leftist-intellectual crowd, pic's vibe could be summed up as
the world's best bad student film. As a lot of Godard could.
