Grok My Enthusiasm (2)

By: Gordon Dahlquist
January 20, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

“There is nothing like it at all. It is hard to take.”

So ends Renata Adler’s Times review of Godard’s Weekend, at the 1968 NY Film Festival. Another critic called the film “a vision of hell to rival Dante”, which might seem grandiose praise — I think it fits just fine — but at least acknowledges the massive scope of this acrid, hilarious, ghastly, breathtaking document. Weekend was the 14th full-length film Godard had made in 7 years and is — inevitably, perhaps, after so much fervent effort — a cinematic immolation, self-consciously pitched to consume all that had come before.

The film starts with each half of a middle-class couple cocooned with their lovers, nursing details of depraved sex (cribbed from Bataille) and scheming to first extract an inheritance from the wife’s mother — by murder, if necessary — and then rid themselves of their spouse. On this mission, then, along with what seems like the whole population of Paris, our couple sets off for a weekend to the country. By the film’s end — and a recitation of all the crazy stuff that happens would not begin to convey the density or cost of the journey — this sliver of plot has somehow delivered us to a band of feral revolutionaries, awash in rhetoric and cannibalism. Time is long gone. Perspective, like civilization, has been abandoned. It’s genuinely hard to remember where you came in — to the story, or the theatre.

The film’s references are so rich that talking in anything but generalities is difficult. Godard’s sensibility is intensely Brechtian, you’re always watching from two (or maybe three) mental perspectives at once. The action is often fake and theatrical. The camera angles leap between deliberate flatness and shocking lyricism. The jokes are more biting than the Coen Brothers. And everything has a frame that — again and again and again, especially the laughs, especially the beauty — knocks you a step back to remember this insanity is happening in your world, too.

There is an unbroken 8-minute shot tracking along a traffic jam. There are so many car accidents that the idea becomes a persuasive metaphor for social failure. That the blood comes in the color of bright poster paint and the quantities of emptied buckets doesn’t undo the horror, but instead make plain that each tableau is an emblem of human misunderstanding to be parsed with dread, like a stage station in a medieval play. Or like the Inferno, another vision somehow so completely fabricated and still so damning. Weekend cracks open the idea of what a film can be, what an artist’s social engagement might mean, what moral responsibility we might demand of spectatorship.

All of these as live questions! It’s incredibly exciting! It’s soul-sapping! Watch the trailer and track this down!

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Grok My Enthusiasm (2)

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