Review of Weekend

Weekend (1967)
'SHELL'IS A PUN
10 May 2004
Reminding us somewhat of the sensibility of Bunuel, or of Fellini, or even the Rossellini of 'Voyage in Italia' with its terminally bickering couple on a motoring holiday (the film was financed and partly made in Italy), Godard's gleefully destructive impulses wilfully contrive all manner of unsurvivable collisions - both physical and metaphysical.

A burning meteor of a film, it fizzes like a bomb with the primordial purpose of such epic and incomprehensible destruction as encompasses the death of the world and the resurrection from its ashes of a new-made and uncontrovertible fundamentalism, punned in the Stone-faced guerrilla rock-band of the Front Liberation de Maine-et-Ouse.

The film crackles with all the energy of the sinister clown-like hippie Angel of Extermination, whose anarchic violence is an efflorescence of energy growing from the barrel of a gun: 'Flamboyance' as he styles the approved modus operandi.

Pure, elemental energy. This is a burning poetical judgement on a world lost in the void. Its formlessness follows its function, and thereby reforms our sense of the possible.

Brilliant incandescent explosion of the hallucinations of an entire age: 'SHELL' IS A PUN.
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