Weekend (1967 film)
Weekend () is a 1967 French black comedy film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring 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 Truffaut's "Les Quatre Cent Coups (The Four Hundred Blows)" and Godard's earlier "Masculin Féminin", appeared in two roles. Raoul Coutard served as cinematographer; "Weekend" was his last collaboration with Godard for over a decade. According to a letter from famous Argentine writer Julio Cortázar to his translator Suzanne Jill Levine, the indirect inspiration  for the movie 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 already presented the idea to Godard, who was unaware of its true source. Plot summary. Roland and Corinne are a bourgeois couple. Each has a secret lover and conspires to murder the other. They drive out to Corinne's parents' home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, resolving to resort to murder if necessary. The trip becomes a chaotically picaresque journey through a French  countryside populated by bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own Facel-Vega is destroyed in a collision, they wander through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history, such as Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Emily Brontë. When Corinne and Roland eventually arrive at her parents' place, they discover that her father has died and her mother refuses to give them a share of the spoils. They kill her and hit the road again, only to fall into the hands of a group of hippie revolutionaries (calling themselves the Seine  and Oise Liberation Front) that support themselves through theft and cannibalism. Killed during an escape attempt, Roland is chopped up and cooked. Themes and style. "Weekend" 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 first scenes Corinne tells her lover about a sexual experience she had. Part of the story she  tells is based on George Bataille novel "Story of the eye" ("Histoire de l'œil").