A brutally satirical film somewhat reminiscent of the works of Luis Bunuel, this was Jean-Luc Godard's most ambitious and vociferous "revolutionary" movie before he retired to the shelter of the Dziga-Vertov group. It's full of funny anti-bourgeois set pieces including one of the great
sequences in all cinema: a full reel, ten-minute tracking shot that proceeds with a stately pace past a very, very long line of stalled automobiles on a French country highway lined with poplars.
This mind boggling film stacks analogy upon analogy and allegory upon allegory with hallucinatory fervor in an episodic odyssey of an unpleasant upper-class Parisian pair out for a weekend trip to visit the wife's mother. Opening with a psychiatric-session monologue by the delicate Darc, clad only
in panties and perched first on a desk, then on a refrigerator as she hesitantly describes a sexual encounter involving an egg and an orifice, the movie quickly moves to the carnage of the roadways during a sunny weekend. A bumper-to-bumper carnival of cars ensues, honking, careening, crashing,
overturning, and burning along with their grotesque occupants as Darc and Yanne proceed on their trip. Along the way social values regarding sex, consumerism, and family are explored in myriad surreal ways. The final result can be viewed as a darkly funny vision of Hell that culminates in one
possible brave new world. One of the essential films of the 1960s.
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