The Cinematheque

“Extraordinary … Godard’s vision of Hell and it ranks with the greatest.”

Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Godard’s astonishing 15th feature, one of his pinnacle achievements, closed the book on the New Wave stage of his career. A self-described ​“film found on the scrapheap,” Weekend offers a savagely funny and surreal satire of our car-crash culture hurtling towards its apocalypse. Godard channels Buñuel, and consumer capitalism runs amok, as a murderous middle-class couple (played by Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne) sets out for a Sunday drive, encountering a series of increasingly elaborate, increasingly gruesome auto accidents. Only by merrily maiming and pillaging as they go can the unpleasant pair make their way safely through the hilarious, horrifying, hallucinatory wreckage of Western civilization. In the meantime, a group of Maoist cannibalistic hippie revolutionaries takes to the woods. The film’s stunning centrepiece—“one of the great sequences in all cinema” (James Monaco)—is a single-take, ten-minute tracking shot along a monumental traffic jam.

In French with English subtitles

“This is Godard’s best film, and his most inventive.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times