New Movies: Society as a Slaughterhouse

Call it genius, self-indulgence or sheer creative ebullience, but Jean-Luc Godard makes his movies like a kid with his first camera. He follows where the camera leads rather than vice versa, with the result that irrelevancies abound, digressions sprout further digressions, and good sight gags are run into the ground by repetition. Godard's pictures are often so visually rewarding, however, that he gets away with a lot of nose-thumbing at audiences.

All this is amply demonstrated in Weekend, Godard's latest diatribe against the bourgeois world. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (TIME, Sept. 27) saw modern society as a big brothel. Weekend sees it as a slaughterhouse. A couple (Mireille Dare and Jean Yanne) are embarking on a motor trip. On a narrow country road, they run into an interminable traffic jam. They inch past a line of strange highway flotsam, including a cage of circus animals and a sailboat on a trailer manned by a mariner in wet-weather gear. A few stalled cars honk furiously at the interlopers, but most of the passengers have simply given up and are playing ball or chess, reading or relieving themselves. When Dare and Yanne finally reach the head of the line, they find a ghastly accident: smashed cars, bodies, and blood all over the road.

This chilling sequence—perhaps the finest single scene that Godard has ever filmed—is only the beginning. During the couple's repeatedly interrupted trip, which lasts for the rest of the movie, wrecked autos, hideously dismembered bodies and senseless violence meet them at every turn. There are a few irrelevant respites, such as a Mozart sonata on the sound track while the camera pans around a farm at sunset, and a couple of overlong political harangues on black revolution and the war in the Mid dle East. But always the film turns back to the violence—on the road and off it—that everyone begins to take as a matter of course. The distracted hus band does not even bother to look around while his wife is being raped in a ditch. The scene presumably symbolizes the dehumanized indifference of modern society.

At last, the couple become part of a Castroish band of guerrillas reconnoitering the French woods. Here, the on-camera death agonies of dumb animals provide a new twinge of horror. In the final scene, the wife is enthusiastically munching away on a hearty meal. "They mixed the pig with what was left of the English tourists," explains the leader of the guerrillas. "The ones from the Rolls?" she asks casually, with her mouth full. Another example of Go-dardian overkill.