Red Typewriters: Jean-Luc Godard

There’s a kind of ill-tempered cliché that tends to be associated with both the French and foreign film in general, a sneering intellectual with a terrible attitude, a taste for the avant-garde and a chip on his shoulder. Godard seems to willfully embody this stereotype – he’s loud, pretentious and certainly sneering - and makes movies that strive to be difficult and generically insulting. If he didn’t have such a sense of humor about it, films like this one would be almost unbearably painful. But Weekend, except for a short dip around the beginning of the third act, is consistently funny, which I guess gives it the right to be smug once in a while. Yes, it may be that the humor here is another one of those slimy devices that makes us laugh at something repulsive and then judges us for our callousness towards it, but I like to think that even as Godard plunged into a fantasy world of Maoist utopianism he could appreciate the need to temper his criticism with some laughs.

The title of course is in English, jibing with the director's thematic branding of America as the fountainhead of hollow style and oppressive hyper-capitalism. This is a film where broad targets are splattered with lots and lots of paint.

Our heroes are Roland and Corinne, a married couple, citizens in a world seething with random, formless violence. They depart on a weekend journey to her father’s house, which owing to the chaos of this society never really gets on track and ends up devolving into ever more spectacular cases of absurd brutality. It’s a world where things like this tend to happen on a regular basis:

This first spat, which the couple watches with casual disinterest from their balcony, gives us a detached viewpoint that quickly disappears as Godard attempts to implicate us in this world, which is unsurprisingly our own with the knobs turned all the way up. Of course, Roland and Corinne fit right in, following in the pattern of Les Carabiniers, his early study in mass beastliness, as leads who are wholly and indefensibly despicable. Their visit to her father involves finding a way to kill him to get her inheritance faster. They share the same mindset as everyone else here; there is rarely a moment where people aren’t screaming at each other, struggling over property or fighting with whatever weapons they can get their hands on.

In Masculin/Feminin Godard made his point about the daily ignorance of ongoing atrocities by inserting instances of random violence (a woman shooting her husband outside a café, gunfire on a crowded train) that were willfully ignored by everyone but those involved. Here, there’s a landscape of concentrated violent chaos that would seem impossible to ignore, including:

Car wrecks

Dead hipsters

Sheep!

Yet they do ignore it, which says a lot about how angry (or at least, how filled with spleen) Godard is at this point in his career. The characters’ behavior takes the satire of the film far beyond overt digs at society into a grand absurdist free-for-all of broad, punishing brutality. The first clear incident is the famous tracking shot, where the camera follows their car as it slowly weaves, for ten uninterrupted minutes, through a traffic jam. The jam functions as a semi-whimsical cross-section of life; in the morass there are zoo animals, boats, people playing chess in the road, teenagers making out, and then this:

Tada! It’s the kind of low blow that the film loves to go for, where it gets us immersed in some absorbing scene and then slaps us with a stunning, violent rejoinder. The idea is simple and obviously valid: how can one enjoy a life of mindless consumerism when there are so many horrible things going on around them?

This is how Godard traps us into feeling bad about ourselves, a technique that’s sure to earn as much annoyance and disdain as it is real feelings of understanding. Again, without the absurdity and humor this would be a disaster (as what I’ve seen of the director’s more soberly pissed off ‘70s material tends to be); it’s fascinating how a film this great comes so close to being crushingly terrible.

The way I see it, the moment where he really tries to trap us is the last section of the second act, where Corinne and Roland have lost their car in the above explosion (Corinne’s reaction is to scream “My Hermes handbag!”) and have hitched a ride with two immigrant workers - a Congolese fellow and a rather unconvincing looking Arab (a Godard regular, Hungarian actor Laszlo Szabo). There have been scenes of class conflict throughout, most prominently an extended argument between a rich woman and the tractor driver who ran over her boyfriend, but here Godard drops us into a grueling marathon of political rhetoric.

It’s presented very simply, two shots that dominate about fifteen minutes of screen time; as the guy from the Congo speaks we see a close shot of the Arab eating, then the Arab speaks and we see the other eating. Like so:

Aside from however the eating ties into the theme of constant consumption, these shots are so stifling because they offer no recourse from the lecture we’re forced to hear. A lot of critics describe this as Godard indulging himself in a little personal speechifying, but I think it’s more than that. He is purposely trying to make us miserable (the way he seems to see it, he has the right to abuse his audience a little), to put us in the exact same shoes as the characters. When faced (literally) with the plights of these two workers, we cannot spare fifteen minutes to listen and instead fidget uncomfortably in our seats. This quote from the 1967 New York Times review seems apt:

“There is a moment near the end when the movie cracks up - long, dogmatic, motionless diatribes on behalf of Africa and the Arab countries with a peroration against black nonviolence, which keeps one thinking Biafra, Biafra, and wanting to walk out. (In fact, it might be advisable to walk out when the speeches begin for a cup of coffee and a cigarette.)”

However joking this reaction may be, it seems like exactly what Godard was begging for, the idea that leaving the theater to consume is preferable to sitting through such speeches. The speeches, then, act as a Brechtian wedge that dispels any notion of this film as winding down as passively enjoyable entertainment. Everything that occurs afterwards is equally hard to stomach.

My first reaction was not only “oh my god what is that thing,” but “why am I being forced to look at it.” Apparently it was intended as food (a rabbit?), and the above still is from after it has been covered with the tidal splashing of the blood of Corinne’s mother’s, who they end up killing after they receive a smaller portion of the inheritance than expected. The same kind of thing occurs later when we’re forced to watch the slaughter of a pig (I never thought I was squeamish, but this almost made me gag) and some skin-crawling cannibalism (more on that later). These are the film’s most immature moments, where Godard is forcing us to admit culpability by basically waving the corpses of dead Vietnamese villagers in our faces.

I find it interesting, however that those two monologues are so purposely boring, when a matching one, occurring near the beginning of the film, is played the opposite way.

Here, Corinne, in her bra and panties, informs her husband of an attempted affair turned into a bizarre and degrading ménage a trois involving the intended lover’s wife. Roland listens impassively (human connection, even jealousy, seem beyond these people), intruding at the end only to ask “was it a nightmare?” Corinne isn’t sure, and without the time or energy to focus on the film’s toying with the fragile, subjective nature of reality, I’ll just focus on how this monologue relates to the other.

The scene is played for laughs, or at least mockery, with a banal, tensely dramatic score that becomes so loud it almost drowns out the character’s voices. At the same time, it’s the kind of thing that grabs your attention, not just because it’s about sex but because it’s tightly and appealingly written, unlike the shambling, unfocused speeches the workers make.

So what is happening here? Is Godard pulling another one of his tricks, pouring all his energy into keeping us hanging on every word in the sex monologue so our annoyance with the political one will seem all the more appalling? I think what’s actually occurring is a concession. Maybe he is capable of admitting that yes, sex and consumption are endlessly appealing, but such pleasure is trivial in the face of such horrors as we are shown.

The sex monologue ties in later to the cannibalism that’s presented. The cannibals are a band of anarchists that capture our heroes, and their eating of humans literalizes the degradation that Corinne described earlier, which involved her performing cunnilingus in a bowl of milk (this film really cannot get past eating) and having eggs cracked over her naked body.

This is the English tourist who they’re preparing to eat, inserting a fish and eggs exactly where it looks like.

A lot is also made by viewers of the apparent fact that these rebels, who act so brutally, are the stand-ins for Godard’s real feelings in the movie. Honestly, this seems ridiculous. They’re portrayed just as badly as the arch-capitalists who dominate the earlier sections of the film , and their ridiculous behavior even connects - the way they play a drum set in the middle of the forest and communicate on short-wave radio with names taken from American movies. It seems like rather than supporting their anarchy Godard is condemning the idea of violence used to combat violence. All of these things – sex, violence, products and food - are united in the wild swirl of selfish consumption. “You can fuck her before you eat her,” one anarchist says to the other. The last shot is of one half of the couple eating the other, inured by the constant violence into becoming a member of the group. This seems like not only another damning refusal of the validity of their actions, but a bold statement on the end result of mindless consumption.

Jean-Pierre Leaud, of The 400 Blows and Masculin-Feminin, gets two of the best roles in this movie. Here he strides around dramatically as St. Juste, a Napoleonesque blowhard. Below, he has a part in the funniest scene in the movie, singing hurriedly into a payphone as Corinne and Roland attempt to steal his car.

Like Les Carabiniers Godard highlights these character’s internal ugliness by making them look generally sour and unattractive. Take a look at the mug on this one.

At one point, our heroes not only meet and argue with Emily Bronte, they set her on fire. This is one of those cases where his complete disregard for rules and order pays fantastic dividends. Not only this, he anticipated a thousand future blockbusters by filling his film with constant shots of exploding cars.