Weekend 1967

Roland Durand and Corinne Durand are a bourgeois couple who each keeps a secret lover, and they conspire to murder the other. They drive to Corinne’s parents’ home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, resolving to resort to murder if necessary. Their plan unfolds against a backdrop of etiquette and pretension, as they navigate the fragile ties of class while weighing a dangerous gamble that could rewrite both of their lives.

The trip becomes a chaotic journey through a French countryside populated by bizarre figures and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own Facel-Vega is destroyed in a collision, they wander through a series of vignettes that probe class struggle and pop up with references to literature and history, such as Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Emily Brontë. The mood shifts from darkly comic to disturbingly immediate, and the landscape itself seems to mirror their unraveling plans.

In a metafictional thread, the film deliberately toys with self-awareness: a driver asks Roland, > Are you in a film or reality? as they flag down a ride, and Corinne and Roland’s search for a car to Oinville nods to the film’s Italian co-production and its own artifice, without ever pinning down which Oinville is meant.

When they finally reach Corinne’s parents’ house, they discover that her father has died and her mother refuses to share any inheritance. The lovers murder the mother and push back onto the road, only to fall into the hands of a group of hippie revolutionaries calling themselves the Front de Libération de la Seine et Oise, who sustain themselves through theft and cannibalism. Le Chef and his followers pursue their own brutal justice, and the story culminates in a violent turn of events: Roland is killed during an escape attempt, and his fate is cruelly sealed as he is chopped up and cooked.