Week-end (1967)

Week-end movie storyline. It’s Saturday, and Roland and Corinne Durand are driving from the city to Oinville for the weekend to visit her dying father. They have systematically been poisoning him over several years, to kill him so they can inherit his estate.

They believe he will die this weekend and they need to be there to ensure that her mother has not altered the will in her favor. Neither knows that the other is having an affair, and Corinne doesn’t know that Roland plans to kill her so he can share the money with his mistress. The happenings over the course of their journey add up to a commentary on their bourgeois values.

Week-end (English: Weekend) is a 1967 French postmodern black comedy film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on Julio Cortázar’s short story “La autopista del Sur”. It stars Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, both of whom were mainstream French TV stars. Jean-Pierre Léaud, comic star of numerous French New Wave films, including François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard’s earlier Masculin Féminin (1966), appeared in two roles. Raoul Coutard served as cinematographer.

Themes and Style

Week-end has been compared to Alice in Wonderland, the James Bond series, and the works of Marquis de Sade. Tim Brayton described it as a “film that reads itself, tells the viewer what that reading should be, and at the same time tells the viewer that this reading is inaccurate and should be ignored.” In one of the early scenes, Corinne tells her lover about a sexual experience she had. Part of the story she tells is based on the Georges Bataille novel Story of the Eye (Histoire de l’œil).

According to a letter from Argentine writer Julio Cortázar to his translator Suzanne Jill Levine, the indirect inspiration for the film was Cortázar’s short story “La autopista del Sur” (“The Southern Thruway”). Cortázar explained that while a British producer was considering filming his story, a third party had presented the idea to Godard, who was unaware of its true source.

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Paul Gégauff, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Blandine Jeanson, Yves Afonso, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Juliet Berto, Jean Eustache, László Szabó, Omar Diop, Anne Wiazemsky
Screenplay by: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography by: Raoul Coutard
Film Editing by: Agnès Guillemot
Music by: Antoine Duhamel
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Athos Films (France), Magna (Italy)
Release Date: December 29, 1967 (France), May 1, 1968 (Italy)