Le Week-End

To rekindle the spark in their marriage, an older man takes his wife to the most romantic city in the world for a whirlwind weekend of food and courtship. It seems the perfect premise for a charming if slightly quaint romantic comedy, focused on people who seldom get to take centre stage in Hollywood. Certainly, its marketing campaign has focused on the film's sharp, giddy bursts of joy and emotion, suggesting that love later in life is possible and even glorious. But, make no mistake about it, Le Week-End is far from a sweet and simple exercise in wish-fulfilment. In fact, this is a prickly, frequently painful look at a relationship that works as much as it doesn't: a bond forged through time, heartache and anger that could as easily be mistaken for love as for hate.

Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) - a couple who have been married for decades - return to Paris, where they had their honeymoon. It soon becomes clear that Nick is desperately keen to make his marriage work again, even as his wife tries - sometimes with great determination, sometimes half-heartedly - to suggest that they go their separate ways. Their son is grown, you see, and there's nothing except years of knowing and being with each other to hold them together.

The film is at its finest when Nick and Meg walk the streets of Paris, their bickering and banter hinting at the rot that has set into their marriage. There is love between them, but not the kind that swells the heart with dreams of romance and magic. It's worn, and tattered, and quite possibly fading. They argue over their good-for-nothing son - Nick wants to take care of him, Meg thinks he should be independent - and Meg finds out that Nick is close to losing his job. They say hurtful things because, after long years of marriage, they know just what to say to really twist the knife. Le Week-End, at least in the beginning, is refreshingly free of sentiment, instead taking a long, hard look at the quiet, seemingly inconsequential tragedies that can eat away at a long relationship.

The character work is also quite wonderful. Neither Nick nor Meg is easily categorised or stuffed into a stereotype. When Nick meets his old college friend Morgan (Jeff Goldblum) in the streets, he's forced to confront the tiny disappointments that have made up his life. It adds depth to this portrait of a man whose eagerness to please is rooted in his abject terror of being alone. On her part, Meg can come across as almost brutally distant, someone who's withdrawn into herself to shake the feeling that something went quite badly wrong in the life she's leading.

Credit is due especially to Broadbent and Duncan, who fearlessly create characters and forge an intriguing chemistry that carry the film through its weaker moments. Broadbent is the tremulous heart of the film, and Duncan its gritty spirit. Together, they make the push and pull between Nick and Meg rich and sad at the same time: these are clearly people who could be better apart, but might not survive the separation.

Where Le Week-End falters is in its good but troubled script by Hanif Kureishi. His characters speak in dialogue that's razor-sharp, reeling off lines that are beautifully crafted but - because they occur with such regularity - can sometimes come off as fake or pretentious. It's jarring in a film that's otherwise so determined to be clear-eyed about romance and love in the real world. The film wraps up awkwardly as well, as if it's not quite sure where to leave this couple: to suggest a happy ending would be to undo its entire narrative trajectory, and yet there can be nothing simple about a pair of lives so tangled and complex.

Anyone hankering after a sweet, gentle romantic comedy set in the cobblestoned streets of Paris should look elsewhere - Le Week-End is dark and sometimes heartbreaking, suffused as it is with a love that's been broken down by loss, sacrifice and disappointment. It's funny, but often in a bittersweet way, and the relationship at its heart sometimes feels as if it might be beyond salvation. Perversely, that's what makes the film work - but it most certainly won't be to everyone's tastes.

The trailer hinted at a charming romp around Paris; reviews suggested something darker. In reality it proved to be a very honest, challenging film, which refused to pop love-in-marriage into a convenient genre-box.

I can understand completely that it wasn't many people's cup of tea. Certainly not a cosy feel-good movie for the growing sixtysomething demographic that presumably ensured finance for the movie to be made. But it your relationship is resilient – or you are single – there is pleasure to be had in this grown-up story.

Yes, it was painful to watch at times, but delightful at others – a bit like life. Yes you wanted to smack them both for being so... annoying. No, you probably wouldn't invite them round to dinner without a certain amount of sighing. But I defy you to work out, before the end, whether they themselves would work out before the end. And I trust it will make a star, at last, of the luminous Lindsey Duncan.

The premise of this piece should send a shudder into viewers. In fact it is handled quite well given the nature of the material, which, as some reviewers are aggrieved about, is not a bourgeois English experience of utter predictability.

It breaks the stereotype in two ways. It's a bitter experience for the two leads after years of marriage and still finding they care for each other through the layers of boredom. That friction adds something interesting, not great, but not entirely stale. The leads carry it well.

It also poaches some ideas from Godard's "Band a part" (The Outsiders). Well, so did Tarantino, and more obviously, but this is quote as the ending sequence makes plain as the man characters do the Madison from that film of the nouvelle vague.

It's a baby boomer experience to never grow old and Lindsay Duncan as Anna Karina, or Jim Broadbent as Sami Frey make a jarring, though amusing, nod to another time; a time which Anglo-Saxon audiences return again in French cinema.

Usually when movies use Paris as a romantic backdrop, it's a young couple who gets to occupy the foreground. Not so with "Le Week-End," a tale of two aging tourists - he a professor of philosophy, she a teacher - who've chosen to "celebrate" their 30th anniversary in (where else? ) the City of Lights.

Like many couples who have been together for a long time, Nick and Meg Burroughs often seem to have more things that are driving them apart than bringing them together. Not only have they grown tired of each other's all-too-predictable habits and quirks, but Meg, in particular, feels that now, with the kids grown and gone, it may be time for the two of them to move on and to spend what little time they have left getting to know themselves as individuals rather than as a couple.

Because the screenplay by Hanif Kureishi is clearly focused on an older couple, the film captures the paradox that exists at the core of lasting romantic love: that the very same predictable patterns and dull routines that, over time, work to deaden love are also what enhance intimacy and bind us inexorably to one another over the long haul.

Though Meg and Nick are still clearly sexual beings, even that fact has caused some tension and division between them, namely in an affair Nick had awhile back and for which he is perpetually atoning. Yet, the script is smart enough to know that what is said in the heat of the moment is not always indicative of what is in the heart.

Much of the second half of the film takes place at a posh and pretentious dinner party thrown by an old college buddy of Nick's, an American author and intellectual played by Jeff Goldblum.

Director Roger Michell keeps the tone serious and intimate without becoming heavy-handed or preachy. He allows the characters to reveal their depth through conversation and the way they interact with the world and each other. He is aided immeasurably by the skilled and incisive performances of Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, who make us truly believe that they are a couple who have grown both comfortable and complacent with one another over time. Above all, "Le Week-End" acknowledges that relationships are tricky and complex things and come with no pat or easy instructions to make them easier to navigate our way through.

After "Le Week-End," it may not be necessary for Richard Linklater to make another "Before…" movie, after all. I think Kureishi and Michell might have done it already.

College lecturer Nick and schoolteacher Meg (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) take the TGV to Paris for their 30th wedding anniversary. He still dotes on her, but she's had the seven-year-itch for at least 23 years. She insists on moving to a more ritzy hotel and makes it plain she'd like to move on to a more ritzy husband. They run into an old college chum of Nick's (Jeff Goldblum) who's got a new young wife. A party at his apartment confirms Meg in her feeling that life has short- changed her.

This sour take on the middle-aged romcom is scripted by Hanif Kureishi in the style of Woody Allen. It has no more substance than a 30-minute TV sitcom - a cross between AS TIME GOES BY and ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE - which is stretched a bit thin at 93 minutes. The best scene involves a restaurant bill they can't afford, but the joke falls flat when it's repeated in the hotel. Jeff Goldblum phones in another variant on his usual rich rogue persona. Jim Broadbent's Nick is a solid if predictable take on Victor Meldrew. Lindsay Duncan's Meg is the best thing in the movie, a partially tamed shrew who thinks - wrongly - that she could have, should have, done better. Married couples - maybe even unmarried couples - may find this film leaves a bitter taste; I think it's meant to.