Week End (1967)

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Jean Yanne, Mireille Darc, and Jean-Pierre Leaud.

Back in the 1960s, Godard was about as unstoppable as any director could be, churning out one great film after another. This film is seen by many as the turning point in his work, in which his revolutionary leanings overwhelmed just about everything else he put on the screen. The film follows a quarrelling bourgeois couple (Yanne and Darc) as they drive through the French countryside, encountering provincial artists and philosophers, wandering revolutionaries, and all manner of vehicular destruction and mayhem (the ten-minute traffic jam is one of the great sequences in cinema). It's clear here that Godard has contempt for these petty, disaffected bourgeois, as they care more for material items than for ideals, and that the only way he feels they can break out of their apathy is to separate themselves from their lives completely. However, the idea of revolution Godard proposes here isn't very appealing either (they're cannibals, after all), and while it's difficult to say whether Godard finds this a marked improvement on the bourgeois lifestyle it's certainly vividly realized and completely original. This has to be one of the strangest films ever made, but it also contains no small amount of dark comedy, and is endlessly thought-provoking.