Two films by Jean-Luc Godard

These reviews were originally published in Filmwaves, 2005-2006.

Weekend (1967)

More than forty years on, Jean-Luc Godard’s incendiary critique of consumer capitalism retains the power to jolt the viewer out of complacency. Perhaps the most savage road movie ever made, Weekend follows a scheming bourgeois couple (Corinne and Roland) who drive from Paris to the countryside in the hope of illicitly procuring an inheritance. The drive sucks them into the brutal world that lies just beneath the façade of middle-class respectability, where consumer goods mean more to people than other human beings and interpersonal relations are determined by exchange-value.

This dystopian voyage through rape, pillage, murder and cannibalism is by turns playful and sickening, never losing its satirical edge. Nouvelle vague hero Jean-Pierre Léaud‘s appearance exemplifies the sharp turns of mood: when the central couple interrupt a telephone conversation conducted through light-hearted song, he attempts to kidnap Corinne, with the intention of owning her.

This objectification forms Weekend’s core; the many philosophical and sociological asides offered to characters or direct to the camera affirm this. Asked about her surname, Corinne can only offer her father’s or her husband’s: she is told, “Christianity is the refusal of self-knowledge; it is the death of language”. Corinne herself is a commodity, like the Hermès handbag she loudly laments as several people die in a motorway accident.

Raoul Coutard’s cinematography is typically brilliant: Godard’s nightmares are alive with colour, and the ten-minute car pile-up shot stands up to its heady reputation. Weekend combines acute analysis of post-war society, with its ideological dislocation (which becomes Weekend’s formal disunity) and shallow virtues, with provocative imagery and, crucially, a sophisticated Brechtian sense of its own status as a film – that is, as a marketable artistic commodity that owes its existence to a system of labour exchange.

Slow Motion (1980)

Slow Motion marked Godard’s return to ‘commercial’ filmmaking: it was an all-star cast of Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye and Jacques Dutronc, rather than conventional narrative construction, that made it in any sense ‘commercial’. Employing the episodic structure that characterised Vivre sa vie (1962), Slow Motion features Huppert as a country girl (Isabelle) working in the city as a prostitute, Baye as a city woman who decides to relocate to the countryside, and Dutronc as a thoroughly disillusioned television director (named Paul Godard), separated from his wife and daughter. The voice of nouveau roman heroine Marguerite Duras is also heard, on the telephone and as voice-over.

Slow Motion incorporates Godard’s typically overt economic and political self-awareness, combining this with a wry explication of the power relations inherent in human sexuality. These are by turns hilarious – notably in an elaborate scene involving Isabelle and another man and woman in a scenario dictated by a company executive – and immensely disturbing, particularly when Paul demands to see his 12-year-old daughter’s developing breasts.

The prostitution metaphor, a Godard favourite, is employed with little subtlety, except in one brilliant moment. A football coach, about to pleasure himself with Isabelle, explains how AS Saint-Étienne should never have sold Dominique Rocheteau, suggesting that both international superstars and sex traders alike are trapped within an economic superstructure that demands sale of the self.

Slow Motion, fundamentally, is about dissatisfaction, and much of the film deliberately disappoints. Godard’s characters are intentionally disengaging, until the growing absurdity of Isabelle’s predicament finally demands sympathy, but above all interpretation as a consequence of social relations. However, it is an interpretation that Godard demanded with more verve, more intellectual rigour and more adventurous construction earlier in his career.