Week End

1967 avant-garde comedy/drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A bourgeousie couple take what is supposed to be a pleasant trip to visit the parents of one of them, although secretly, they are hoping for their deaths. The trip starts out terribly with a fender bender that leads to neighbors shooting bullets and arrows and serving a barrage of tennis balls at them. The trip only gets worse--ghastly traffic jams, numerous burning automobile accidents, kidnappings, and a piano concert that seems to go on forever.

Radical filmmaking reminiscent of Bunuel's choppier surrealist works and Songs from the Second Floor, crazily episodic, disturbing, and darkly humorous. This benefits from a very made-up-as-it-goes approach, and although not all the extended scenes work, they all manage to seem really important. Classic epic traffic jam scene featuring giraffes, chess players, broken bodies, picnickers, and people playing catch between cars and building to a devastating denouement is jaw-dropping, one extended tracking shot nearly worth the price of admission alone. Very meta film--minor characters ask if they're real or part of a movie and flashy title cards proclaim the film as the end of cinema. I didn't care for all the political stuff (nor did I completely understand it...indictments of both Western Culture and cinema) and those title cards seem tacky and overdone, but this is very entertaining absurdism. Comedy roadkill and satiric chaos! As the opening credits promise, this is a "film adrift in the cosmos."

Here I am, also adrift in the cosmos: