Roland and Corinne are a bourgeois couple whose marriage has fallen apart: each has a secret lover, and both have agreed that the other may have to be killed. Their plan is a car trip to Corinne's parents' country home, where her dying father is about to leave an inheritance they intend to secure. What should be a routine journey turns into a chaotic trek through the French countryside, marked by violent crashes and encounters with eccentric figures. The film moves through a sequence of episodes that blend dark humour, social satire and references to literature and history, in a deliberately disorderly tone that defies conventional storytelling.

How it was made

The film has an indirect origin in Julio Cortázar's short story La autopista del sur. According to a letter from the Argentine writer to his translator Suzanne Jill Levine, while a British producer was considering adapting the tale, someone else pitched the idea to Godard, who was unaware of its literary source. Godard wrote and directed the film, a co-production between Italy and France. It stars Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, both familiar faces from French television, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays two roles. Raoul Coutard served as cinematographer, in what was his last collaboration with Godard for more than a decade. The film mixes location shooting with intertitles and moments in which the characters seem aware they are inside a fiction, placing it firmly in avant-garde territory.

Reception and legacy

The film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 1968 Berlin International Film Festival. Its portrait of bourgeois society and class struggle, wrapped in a violent farce, made it one of the most controversial works of Godard's political period. It has been compared to Alice in Wonderland, the James Bond series and the work of the Marquis de Sade. Critics today regard it well: on Rotten Tomatoes it holds an approval rating of about 93% from 28 reviews. Its treatment of animals, with real slaughter in the final scene, has sparked debate over how far the film condemns the cruelty it depicts.