On Jean-Luc Godard | Roger Ebert

Godard's "Weekend" is not a narrative film like "Bullitt," and it makes no attempt to tell a story. But neither is it a purely visual film like "2001," existing within its own self-contained rationale. Godard jams his films full of political, literary, cinematic and historical references. But they don't seem to be organized according to any system. In "Weekend," characters wander in and out, expressing disorganized thoughts about Mozart, the Third World, the function of the cinema and things like that.

On this level, "Weekend" is a great deal like an erudite cocktail party: Lots of well-informed people drift about repeating things they learned in college survey courses and nothing gets accomplished or decided, but at the end you have a feeling of unease - as if this world, and the things said in it, were a frail shield against some approaching cataclysm.

That's on one level. On another level, Godard makes the most purely cinematic movies yet achieved. He uses his camera and his images to create a world that has no existence outside this particular movie. He doesn't pretend his characters are real people, or his "plots" are real, or his dialog. In "Weekend," Godard's hero tells the heroine: "This is a lousy movie. All you meet are sick people." At another point, a motorist asks the hero: "Are you real life or in a movie?"

This sort of thing irritates the hell out of some audiences, who think Godard is merely being clever. But it goes beyond that. No movie characters are real. No situations or dialog are real. Then isn't it more real to admit that? "Weekend" is about some hypothetical time and country when the barbarism of modern life is routinely accepted. Related subject matter has been covered in many movies, often of the science-fiction genre. Isn't it more real to abandon the attempt at a story and admit that you're a director making this movie with these actors?

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