Jean-Luc Godard's cathartically political and infuriating masterpieceWeekend is one of the key films of the late 1960's. It is on one hand a chaotically brilliant black comedy and on the other hand a surrealistically acid disdain on the nihilistic bourgeoisie consumer society. Weekend is less like a film and more like a abstract angry political collage, as its pop art color scheme and its two-dimensional lover's go on a surreal cross-country road trip which descents down a fantastical rabbit hole of utter hell. A married couple named Corinne and Roland, are plotting each other's demise with their respective lovers, while at the same time both planning to head out by car for Corinne's parents' home in the country to secure their inheritance from Corinne's dying father by murdering him. In one of the iconic sequences of the film the perpetually bickering couple bully themselves through an epic traffic jam that serves as a cross-section of the bourgeoisie middle class, as one long take shows a debris field of wrecked and burning vehicles, dead corpses, and repeated honking horns.
Godard told critics as the road unleashes the two protagonists inner beastliness and primitive instincts, as they route through a hellish landscape of predatory unconscious that resembles a projection of political violence and angry ideology, allusions to ideas and high-culture, free-ranging historical personalities and characters from literature, and philosophical garbage collectors and cannibal freedom-fighters; all the while the two of them slowly approach the collapse and destruction of Western civilization. Godard repeatedly fractures the narrative with flash cuts and inter-titles while he greatly tests the patience of his audience with such fascinating sequences of a barnyard recital of Mozart's Piano Sonata no. 18, as the camera makes a complete 360-degree rotation, as we see the entire barnyard pianist, listeners, passersby, and the camera crew three times in one sequence.