Amazon.com Essentials:
Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic
duel in the
'60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's
Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory
in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm
in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian
couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the
wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and
vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal
encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical
cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with
them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the
bored, apathetic heart of the bourgeoisie is never far from acting out its
most homicidal fantasies. --Alan E. Rapp
