The entire journey is marked by crashes and deaths, but Roland and Corinne remain unaffected. When their car crashes in flames, we hear Corinne's pained scream for the loss of her Hermes bag, more emotionally devastating to her than all the carnage and death around them. These are one-dimensional characters motivated only by self-interest and greed. Reduced to continuing on foot, they encounter a series of historical and literary figures – Saint-Just, one of the bloodiest figures of the French Revolution ( a brief appearance by New Wave mainstay Jean-Pierre Leaud); Emily Bronte and Tom Thumb ... there's a Mozart piano recital in a barnyard ... scattered reflections of history and culture to whose meaning the bourgeois couple remain impervious.
What narrative there is in Weekend all but disappears as the journey continues; the scene at the parents' house is just a throwaway. And eventually Roland and Corinne are captured by a band of hippie revolutionaries who live in the woods and seem to survive by preying on tourists, robbing and eating them ... this final sequence, accompanied by a lengthy drum solo and a voice-over speaking lines from Lautreamont's poetry, is like a horror reworking of the idyllic conclusion of Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, released the previous year, in which the members of a commune devote their lives to preserving the literary culture abandoned by a vacuous and bankrupt society. But for Godard there is no romance here, just violence and cannibalism.
In retrospect, it looks as if Godard had prescient knowledge of the social explosions which would occur in early 1968, shortly after the film's release. But the sense of epic apocalypse in Weekend seems larger than a mere reflection of current social conflicts. There's a sense of deep disgust at humanity in general; the apocalypse is shown as an almost desirable washing away of a civilization which has reached bottom.
As in many of Godard's films, the visuals are frequently interrupted by large blocks of text, ironic commentary and political slogans, and the imagery itself is harsh and ugly by conventional standards. The director had cinematographer Raoul Coutard underexpose the fastest film stock available at the time and push it in the lab, creating heavy grain and murky colors, with detail often obscured. The soundtrack is harsh and grating – endless car horns and cacophonous voices fighting with classical music. You get the distinct impression that Godard would be happy if the film drove its audience out of the theatre ... in fact the final card reads “The end of cinema”. It's said that the director told his crew at the end of production that they should look for work elsewhere because he was finished with traditional ways of making movies (although Coutard, in an interview on the disk, denies ever hearing this).
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