Plot
A bourgeois French married couple, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc), both have secret lovers and are both planning each other's murder. They set out by car for Corinne's parents' home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, by murdering him, if necessary.
The trip becomes a chaotically picaresque journey through a French countryside populated by bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own car is destroyed, the characters wander through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history, creating an overall impression of a humorous, beautiful, but also senseless and frightening world. Godard's trademark intertitles intrude suddenly, cutting off and commenting on the action and the process of film viewing itself. For example, two graphics near the beginning announce that you're watching 'a film adrift in the cosmos' and 'a film found on a scrap heap'.
The film is particularly well known for a single tracking shot that lasts for over 8 minutes. The shot follows a car slowly moving through a traffic jam. After eight minutes, the cause is discovered: a family has been in a car accident and their bodies lie across the road. It is a stark contrast to the beeping horns and frustrated drivers waiting to get by.
Corinne and Roland eventually arrive at her parents' place, only to find that her father has died and her mother is refusing them a share of the spoils. They kill her and set off on the road again, only to fall into the hands of a group of hippie revolutionaries supporting themselves through theft and cannibalism, in whose encampment the film ends.
Julio Cortázar's story "La Autopista del Sur" ("The Southern Thruway", 1966) supposedly influenced this film. (Oviedo: 1992; Varanini: 2000).
Read more about this topic: Weekend (1967 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)