Weekend

In Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), a bickering, unhappy husband and wife embark on a nightmarish ride in the country, ostensibly to visit her dying father and hopefully secure their place in his will. They are delayed by a series of strange, even horrifying, incidents, including a very long traffic jam. Godard is full of ideas about the class struggle, the vapid, vain problems of the bourgeois French (and the bourgeois everybody, really), and consumer culture. But he's preachy about it: his characters go on tirades about various problems including Western imperialism in Africa (actually that was the most interesting part of the movie because of the ideas, not because of how they were being depicted). It took me three days to finish the damn thing because it's such a colossal bore. Perhaps I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate this kind of arty film, but I found myself yearning for a compelling story and resentful of all the symbolism. Godard is often praised by critics, and indeed I could find very few negative words about Weekend. 105 min. ★