Jean-Luc Godard makes a traffic jam funny, ugly and frightening in Weekend, a fierce comedy about people and their possessions. The images remain sharper than the political speeches, which sometimes try our patience.
Weekend is a fierce, funny film with a tiresome habit of explaining why it is angry. Jean-Luc Godard writes and directs a comedy in which being stuck in traffic becomes reason enough to lose faith in respectable people. His attack on consumerism works because the objects are so ordinary: a road full of cars needs little explaining. We recommend it, provided long political speeches do not cancel out the pleasure of watching a film this willing to interrupt itself.
The traffic-jam tracking shot is the clearest reason to stay. Raoul Coutard’s camera travels beside the queue without a cut, allowing the sheer quantity of cars to become oppressive. We laughed, then began to feel trapped. The shot keeps going beyond the point at which the joke would usually end, making us spend time with a blockage we would ordinarily pass in an edit. Its length makes the impatience physical, and the lurid colour gives us little relief.
Mireille Darc’s Corinne Durand and Jean Yanne’s Roland Durand give that hostility two human faces. Their flatness is funny: neither actor works hard to win our affection. That suits a comedy in which the wish to get on with one’s own business can look thoroughly ugly, and their attachment to possessions gives us enough to recognise. Spending so long with such limited sympathies does have a cost, though, and the performances cannot supply much warmth when the writing starts to lecture.
Agnès Guillemot’s editing helps keep interrupting the film’s progress, so the long traffic shot never establishes a pace we can settle into. The changes in image and sound can be abrasive, but they keep familiar comic situations from becoming comfortable. Antoine Duhamel’s music adds to the unease, and there is little encouragement to sit back and enjoy the journey. The interruptions demand attention even when the story has given us little reason to care about anybody in it.
The political talk is less successful, and this is where the writing starts to exhaust the goodwill earned by the pictures. Some passages go on after their point is clear, leaving us with little to do except register agreement or resistance. We have already understood the disgust with consumerism by watching the queue, so being told about it feels unnecessary. A speech can keep insisting without adding anything, whereas the tracking shot keeps giving us more to look at.
Among comedies about class, Weekend is unusually unwilling to let us enjoy the bad manners and then go home pleased with ourselves. Its nastiness can be exhausting, and 104 minutes is ample time to discover how much of it we can take. Yet the traffic jam stays troubling because it makes such recognisable selfishness look both ridiculous and dangerous. Choose it for a night when an argument afterwards would be welcome.
