Week End
Time Out New York Project: Issue #831, October 6-12, 2011
★★★★☆
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 1967. N/R. 105mins. In French, with subtitles. Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon.
Apocalypse wow! Godard’s self-proclaimed “film found in a dump” famously declared, in its end credit, it was the fin de cinema. That boast now seems more garrulously tongue-in-cheek than bruisingly fist-to-face, but the best parts of this affront on all things bourgeois still pack a caustic wallop. At the center of Godard’s anticapitalist maelstrom are unhappily marrieds Corinne (Darc) and Roland Durand (Yanne), who set out on a weekend journey to collect an inheritance, yet are immediately forced on a number of surreal detours.
The best of these comes early: a traffic jam — captured in a single eight-minute shot — that the couple navigates while car horns screech in ear-shattering symphony. It’s the movie in miniature, with a succession of hilarious, comic-panel tableaux — sailboats and Shell trucks and llamas, oh my! — that builds to a blood-chilling punch line. No amount of Emily Brontë cameos, Hermès handbag lamentations or gun-toting cannibal Marxists can top the sequence. Godard’s just going through the provocateurist motions from then on, sometimes brilliantly (a car crash is equated with the film jumping its sprockets), sometimes disgracefully (the actual onscreen killings of a goose and a pig are bullyingly empty gestures). The satire may be scattershot — 1972’s Tout va bien is a more potent attack on plutocratic values — but you’ll still be unsettled in all the right ways. As long as cinema like this exists, there’s no end in sight.—Keith Uhlich
