Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Consider the scene where the woman has the monologue in her panties and bra, how she leads up such telling, informatory details to a payoff that gives as a reminder of the Walken scene in Pulp Fiction (though he is the better actor). Or in other times the comedy is in the sense of a Godard satire of his past work - the traffic set piece(s) gets the viewer to feel in the mood of the car he so pacingly follows, even as it becomes relentlessly obnoxious and tense, and acts like every other driver on the streets of the cities of America.

However that, and a moment of argument over a corpse in the passenger seat (he cuts to the faces of the onlookers who happen to find such dialogue rather amusing), show by the time Godard reached this stage in his career he wasn't taking himself and his work 100 % seriously, though that's not to say that the element of the woman's path to guerilla-hood isn't a serious topic. For his art film die-hards he also uses a peculiar, non-linear style in story-telling- an added advantage for a week-end timepiece.

I'm reminded of Fellini (as I was while watching another Godard film of recent, Contempt) in one aspect of the picture, in terms of how he portrays his women- he can love them, ignore them, belittle them, or even glorify them in the most drastic of measures, but he can't control them. One also wonders if this is how he just makes it for his films, or if in real life the women of his life were really this (how do I put it) out-there.

The script occasionally veers off on it's tale of a couple going on a disastrous week-end out for stretches of poetry, discussion, things that don't have much to do with the story, and yet there's a catching, eccentric, melodic aura to these scenes and passages. These kinds of scenes make it perfectly clear that Godard has created an original work here, one that may put off audience members who "don't get it" or expect total sense in the outcomes. Certainly a movie made for it's time, country of origin, and target group.

To sum up my review let me put it this way - this is the kind of picture that would've heavily influenced The Doors.