Week End - "What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people..."

Week End is a 100-minute-long acid trip that makes Deliverance look like a boy scout nature walk on a Sunday afternoon. Jean-Luc Godard definitely left his mark on this 1967 film that can easily be argued as his most notorious work. The film begins with the married couple discussing a very intense sexual encounter that involves the wife, another couple, eggs, milk, oral sex, oral-to-anal sex, anal sex, and mutual masturbation. Along with being an extremely crude conversation, the scoring of the scene also makes it stand out in the minds of the audience. The volume of the music that plays beneath the scene raises as she describes the more taboo things she did that night. This effect is very effective for one main reason: it forces the audience to listen harder, and as they listen harder they are forced to hear the more hardcore actions of that evening.

Followed by this scene is one of the longest tracking shots that has ever been filmed. This shot shows the couple attempting to drive around an extremely long traffic jam that is filled with boats, broken down cars, blown up cars, dead bodies, monkeys, lions, kids on a field trip, and a family picnic. After murdering the mother of the bride, the couples ultimately ends up captured by a group of cannibals that murder the husband and happily feed his remains to his wife. As crazy as the film seems, Godard does a number of different things with all the chaos he creates on film.

Throughout the film, the couple encounters many extremely odd people that range from a killer magician to a jester poet. However, he uses these characters to raise awareness to many different societal issues that were going on at the time. Or possibly he just wanted to shed light on his own anarchic thoughts. Regardless, he manages to gain peoples attention with all of these different societal problems. Each of these unique characters bring up issues of anti-corporations, race relations, class issues, literature and history. On the surface Week End almost looks like an over-budgeted snuff film. However, Godard manages to bring up more societal issues within this film than any of his others we've seen.