Subtitled “a film found on a dump”, this surreal offering from nouvelle vague/French New Wave firebrand Jean-Luc Goddard predated the publication of J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash by six years but shares some of its concerns, particularly the fetishization of the motor car and the depiction of a society coming to the end of its natural life cycle. As with so much of Goddard’s work, it seethes with anger at and contempt for the French middle classes (“the horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror”). Some will find it insufferably pretentious while others will be utterly baffled by it, but one assumes that was just how Goddard wanted it.

The story follows a young bourgeois couple, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc who, like Yanne, was a popular television star at the time) who set off on a road trip to claim an inheritance from Corinne’s dying father over the course of a single weekend. They’re a loathsome couple, each having affairs and plotting to murder each other. Their journey is an increasingly chaotic and surreal one – as they leave the city, they find themselves caught up in a massive traffic jam; they crash their own car, adding to the automotive detritus that litters every road they travel down (in the aftermath of the collision, the materialistic Corrine famously exclaims with horror “my Hermes handbag!”); come to realise that they’ve actually characters in a film (“This isn’t a novel, this is a film. A film is life”); they meet figures from literature and history like Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Emily Brontë (Blandine Jeanson) and Tom Thumb (Yves Afonso); a herd of sheep suddenly materialises out of nowhere; they come across Léaud in a second role singing in a public payphone; and eventually fall in with a commune of hippie revolutionaries who end up eating Roland.

The film ends with the bold statement “fin du cinema” and throughout there’s a sense that Goddard has lost interest in the traditional norms of filmmaking. The score often drowns out the dialogue (the whole soundtrack is a cacophony of engine noises, car horns and twisting metal of collisions) and he deliberately makes what at first seem to be clumsy technical errors but which turned out to be deliberate choices – fades that don’t quite line up properly, the film seeming to jump sprockets when the couple’s car crashes (an “error” fixed in the New Yorker DVD release), takes begin too early with the actors visibly preparing or end too late with the actors reverting to their real selves.

And yet, ever the contrarian, Godard pulls of moments here that are supremely cinematic, chiefly a pair of justly famous long takes. He sends cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s camera prowling along a mammoth and very noisy traffic jam for a full seven minutes and later has it pan slowly around a village square for eight minutes while a pianist entertains the locals. One can’t help but feel that Godard was simply testing the patience of his audiences with these shots. Elsewhere, he flashes up captions that may sometimes be ironic comments on what we’re looking at (that pan around the square is headed “action musicale”) or indicators of how far into the weekend we are but mostly seem to be meaningless. They are, it seems, fully of literary puns that only really make sense in French, and which don’t really translate.

It’s probably best to abandon any pre-conceived notion of what film or even story-telling should be about and just go with the flow. No doubt Goddard would hate that – he despises the passive viewer – though for many it might be the only sane response. In his time as a critic for the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard railed against the stifling conventional nature of French cinema and, as a leading light of the New Wave, led the charge to bring more experimentation to filmmaking. In a sense, Week End feels like the apogee of that experimentation.

Politics are a key ingredient in any Godard film and Week End was one of the first of his films in which his Marxist beliefs come into sharp focus. One lengthy sequence has two refuse collectors deliver a lengthy diatribe against Western Imperialism (but, true to form, focusses on the face of the listener rather than the speaker each time) and in Godard’s world, the classes are constantly at war with each, to the point where society itself is on the brink of collapse. Cars have become not only the ultimate status symbol but also the ultimate weapon, spreading death and violence wherever they go. The roads travelled by the couple on their bizarre journey are littered with the bodies of the dead and peppered with insane, gun-happy, philosophising – perhaps even magical – hippie hitchhikers (“I’m here to inform these modern times of the grammatical era’s end, and the beginning of flamboyance, especially in cinema”).

Goddard has little faith in or love for the human race and the film is shot through with a heavy does of cynicism and misanthropy. He sees us as just a hairbreadth away from total social collapse, a world in which the trigger-happy cannibal hippie clan that Corinne and Roland fall foul of at the end. Week End sometimes feels like the story is playing out in a fictional world at some point between the end of David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of Crash and five minutes before the start of Mad Max (1979).

Week End is a transitional film in Goddard’s filmography. As the “fin du cinema” caption suggests, it marked the end of the director’s narrative film period (not exactly traditional by any means but at least a time when he made films with some identifiable elements from mainstream cinema) and the start of something even more wayward, the start of a period where the films became increasingly vehicles for his radical revolutionary ideology. Un film comme les autres/A Film Like Any Other (1968) for example continued the automotive theme (it’s set in a car factory) but was largely concerned with revolutionary students debating with the workers.

How you react to Week End will largely depend on how closely you align with Godard’s politics, whether or not you can accept his challenging rewriting of the rules of filmmaking and your tolerance for dialogue that really is quite pretentious at times. It’s a difficult film but a fascinating one, alternately tedious, infuriating and engrossing. It’s certainly not your usual drama about a dysfunctional relationship, dallying with horror, science fiction, surrealism and something quite unclassifiable as Godard very publicly struggles with the cinema in general and with the New Wave that he’d become the figurehead for in particular. It’s not the best place to start with Godard if you’re new to the director – his debut, À bout de souffle/Breathless (1960), Bande à part/Band of Outsiders (1964) or the science fiction film noir Alphaville (1965) might be better launching pads – but it’s certainly one to seek out for Godard’s extraordinary attempts to press the self-destruct button on his career thus far.