You know how everyone claims that their city has the worst drivers? Well, we can all call it quits, because Jean-Luc Godard’s scorching satire offers filmic evidence of some of the truly most egregious driving ever put to film (aside from maybe Vin Diesel driving off a dam in Fast X). With a masterful and technically impressive long dolly shot, Godard follows entitled bourgeois couple Roland and Corinne Durand as they illegally take the oncoming lane to bypass a lengthy traffic jam. Over a foundation of constant horn blaring and honking (because laying on your horn notoriously solves ALL car-related problems), camera and couple alike pass numerous humorous images of the stalled traffic: a couple playing chess in the street, a woman irate at a gasoline truck blocking her way though she’s fully in the wrong lane, a car that effortlessly parries the couple’s attempts to zipper-merge back in and cut the line. But the anticipation with any traffic incident is always there: what caused everything to come screeching to a halt in the first place? The sudden revelation of a bloody crash, bodies strewn about a roadside next to crumpled metal is a jarring, shocking sight, a gory tableau conjured from everyday elements and portrayed in almost banal fashion. All of this inconvenience for so many behind, but a life-changing or -ending event for a few. That this scene of horror is so familiar to so many who’ve been on a highway is the real hammer-blow. We are living inside a capitalist horror story, Godard asserts. It’s not so much a horror story as a lark for the Durands, ripping about the French countryside with little regard for human life while they plot both their own infidelity and their collection of a hefty inheritance. But soon enough the world around them is their own car crash. Not that it was that stable to begin with. The trip begins with a man shooting at them for crashing into his car, and they wrap up their tour in the clutches of a crew of gun-toting cannibalistic hippies. Throughout it all, Godard favors to observe proceedings at a remove, as if to shrug and say “well, that’s all folks.” The hopeful revolutionaries become the colonial oppressor, the peace-loving commune a den of violence. Eat the rich, literally.
THE RULES
SIP
Someone says ‘Oinville’.
An intertitle appears onscreen.
Someone fires a weapon.
A car is on fire.
BIG DRINK
Someone tries to flag down a car.
We pass a comedy gag during the long traffic shot.