Godard's Week-end is often regarded, and advertised, as a film to shock, containing as it does scenes of murder, rape and cannibalism, but this is nonsense because these violent scenes take place off-scene. Godard is certainly film director who has a great ability to shock, but not in the content of his films as such, more in the extremely original way he makes them. The plot of Week-end isn't really important, which is just as well because there isn't really one there, and the motivation behind the action is in effect a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin. A married couple, Roland Durand (Jean Yann) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) are on their way to Corinne's parents and after their inheritance, even if it means murder. They get held up by a big traffic accident, crash their car, and on their return journey are kidnapped by the Front de Liberation de la Seine-et-Oise. Roland is killed trying to escape and Corinne becomes a member of the group.
It's what happens on the way that is the focus of interest, as well as what Godard is saying. This was Godard's last commercial film before he moved on to another stage of film-making. It is apocalyptic, an extreme beyond which it is difficult to imagine going beyond, and although it is now viewed as a great film, at the time of release it baffled many people. It is, as might be expected, a continuation of Godard's criticism of consumer capitalism, but Godard pushes the boundaries as never before.
The main point of attention is the car, that hugely important extension of the human being, and here Godard goes out of his way to illustrate how it has become a symbol not only of wealth but also worth, how it distorts reality to the point of madness. In fact, to the point that the car – far from being an advance in civilisation – actually not only enslaves us but turns us into savages. This is seen near the beginning of the film when the Durands set out on their journey of greed and a child dressed in redskin gear yells at Roland for bumping into his father's parked car. Despite Roland's attempt to bribe the child into silence, the mother comes out and throws tennis balls at him, and her husband fires a shotgun. (Many people in the film have guns.)
And then comes the famous eight-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam due to an accident with several fatalities. Although the viewer is blasted out by car horns, the individualism that the car symbolises has been transgressed and the road is now a stationary public space with men playing ball with children in other cars, people picnicking, playing chess on the tarmac, and card games on car bonnets. As the Durands eventually pass the dead bodies they do so casually, as if what they see is an everyday occurrence. And scenes such as this as repeated, with multiple burning car pile-ups and bodies strewn across the countryside being passed very casually. In fact – perhaps a more disturbing thing – the wrecks seem positioned in such a way as to appear almost as works of art.
On their way, the Durands also meet 'Emily Brontë', Tom Thumb, and 'Saint-Just': Godard, as usual, is throwing in various cultural references, and a Mozart is played on a piano in a farmyard, Jean-Pierre Léaud sings Guy Béart's 'Allô...tu m'entends ?' in a phone box, the terrorist's drummer quotes from Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror, there is an allusion to Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, etc. In this last mentioned scene there is perhaps one of the most extreme distancing devices in the film: Corrine is speaking to a man friend about sex, and although she's in her underwear there is an absence of titillation because the lighting is too dark to see much at all, and the background music frequently drowns out the language spoken.
Week-end is nevertheless a dazzling tour de force, to some extent a prediction of May 1968, although the most shocking scenes are the murder of a pig and a fowl.
Henri Vernueil's Un singe en hiver is of course a classic, full of highly memorable phrases, and largely set in Villerville, Calvados. Starring Jean Gabin (as Albert Quentin) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (as Gabriel Fouquet) it is highly amusing and the kind of film you can watch many times over, but then as it's based on Antoine Blondin's novel of the same name that's perhaps hardly surprising. I've watched a few video clips of Villerville, one being Belmondo's relatively recent return to the village, the other a collection of people watching a showing of the film, with many of them being able to repeat every line of it.
Un singe en hiver is a kind of buddy movie, but only in the second part. The first part shows France (OK, Tigreville (or Villerville, which now has both names)) under Nazi occupation, the village being bombed, and a drunken Albert in the cellar of their hotel/restaurant with his terrified wife. Albert vows that if they come out of the experience alive he'll never drink again.
And then the name of the street changes names from Pétain to De Gaulle and it's fifteen years later. Gabriel lands in a taxi one night in Tigreville and is put up at Hotel Stella (in reality L'Hôtel des Bains), but as there are no alcoholic drinks there he goes to the Cabaret Normand, gets drunk on Picon bière and when the locals start talking about the temperature in Normandy he gets up, does a flamenco and announces 'Ça, c'est le soleil !'. He staggers (or rather is thrown out) leaving the natives to their 'igloos' and 'banquises'. His ex-partner in Spain, he's mentally still in Spain (in spite of his daughter in Tigreville), and Albert mentally still in China, babbling about the length of the 'Yang-Tsé-Kiang' river. Gabriel later gives a daytime bullfight (à la Blondin) with the cars and is arrested for it (à la Blondin).
That Albert will briefly break his teetotal vow is inevitable when confronted by such a charismatic person as Gabriel, but after the fireworks Albert has to return to normality, to see his father's grave as he does every year, and Gabriel has to move on with his daughter. And the monkey? Well, in China in winter they leave the jungle for the town, where the people gather them to return on trains to their rightful place. True? It's truly a super movie.
First recognized along with the likes of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco as a defining figure at the forefront of the theatre of the absurd, French playwright Adam Adamov had a fairly prolific career, writing twenty plays between 1947 and his death in 1970. Now though he has fallen into obscurity. John J. McMann provides a study of Adamov's work which traces the playwright's artistic development and explores his role in defining the avant-garde and political theaters of France.
Adam Adamov doesn't get much of a grave here, which is absurd, but then like Alfred Jarry's grave is pretty much to be expected. Adamov wrote about twenty plays, but is now almost forgotten: in 1962 Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd lists ten authors in huge letters on the cover of the Pelican version, and Adamov is one of them. But Esslin accepting the OBE from her royal etc, now that really is absurd...
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