Le Week-End

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.

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.

For a film supposedly set in Paris this has no 'feel' of France. The train journey feels genuine - mostly because it probably is filmed on a train, (note 'a' train). The characters arrive at some place that is seen only in narrow view - are we in a cupboard at Elstree? Duncan and Broadbent exchange insults and variously sulk, resort to acts of minor violence and generally behave badly. Just like a couple of idiotic teenagers on their first unsupervised shopping trip to a regional shopping centre. We're supposed to believe that they are senior teachers with respectable professional lives. Really? There's a lot of expletives for the teacher type who is most likely not to resort to this shorthand-offensiveness. So, there they are, this middle aged couple behaving like a poor version of Steptoe and Son and having a crisis of who-can-win-the-game-of-passive-aggression most spectacularly, (i.e. how big an audience can they get for their little game). Broadbent and Duncan occasionally manage to bring slightly more to the storyline than in reality is there. Shame. This whole story could be better told in any number of ways.

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.

Oh Paris, je t'aime!

What do you get when you mix the influence of French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard, the acting talents of Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, the sturdy direction of Roger Michell and poised writing of Hanif Kureishi? What feels like the unofficial fourth entry to the Before Sunrise independent film trilogy, Le Week-End is a film that could easily be mistaken as the extended look at the lives of Jesse and Celine, years after their fateful meeting in Vienna.

There is something exquisite and magical with films set in Paris, a city that is most commonly known as the 'city of love'. And although Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick Burroughs (Jim Broadbent) choose to revisit Paris after thirty years of marriage and re-live their honeymoon after a long and challenging life together, things don't exactly go how each of them planned. Instead, what surfaces is a film budding with sophistication, film history, and bittersweet revelations that showcase a world of fading lovers and seasoned couples.

Le Week-End is a film set in the fine wine capital of the world. Surrounded by couples holding hands, sharing moments of pure love and wonder, Meg and Nick have some serious marital issues to face, but instead decide to lather over them with the spectacular sights and sounds of the Eiffel Tower, the River Seine and upper-class dining and accommodations. Both highly irritated with each other's approach to life, their children and their relationship as a whole, Meg and Nick use the vacation as a means to reconnect. However, the couple unexpectedly run-into one of Nick's former student's and now renown author Morgan (Jeff Goldblum). Morgan invites Meg and Nick to a dinner party to celebrate the release of Morgan's latest literary achievement. However, Meg and Nick get a lot more than just dinner among friends, and instead their evening turns into a plethora of ultimatums and heartfelt realities.

The grand beauty of Le Week-End lies in the chemistry between Broadbent and Duncan. As two educators in their own sense, Nick a university professor and Meg a teacher, the two honeymooners surely belong to a class of people who are in constant pursuit of life experiences. Sadly, the couple, who have lived their lives catering to the needs of others, can't seem to get rid of their overly mature son, who has found his way back to basement of their home. Torn between what is right and what is necessary, Nick and Meg's parental approach is clearly outlined in the short snippets of calls Nick receives from their son. Thankfully, the heart of Le Week-End is easily found, not in the commentary of parenting, but in the depth of fleeting love, and Duncan and Broadbent share a hate to love for one another that could only be seen in some of the misunderstood, post modern works of European artists almost sixty years prior.

Meg and Nick use their thirty year wedding anniversary as a muse towards re-connecting. Meg, seeing the vacation as a 'last chance at love' for her and her husband, adopts a very go with the flow, careless attitude towards their spending and experiences in the Parisian city. Early on, it is clear that Nick is the money saver and principle earner in the relationship. While Nick sees Paris as an escape from their mundane lives in Birmingham, he also sees it as an opportunity to indulge in a weekend filled with romance and wild, kinky sex with his gorgeous wife–whom he still very much loves and longs for. Meg on the other hand is mostly repulsed with her husband, describing him as "making her blood boil like no body else'. Where Nick replies that that indeed is "the sign of a deep connection". Essentially, life happens. For every good, there is a bad, for every high, there is a low. Le Week-End showcases these highs and lows, few and far between.

While the couple travels together, they are mostly a duo of outsiders with one another. From the moment we meet the rambunctious Meg and patient Nick, we experience a dialogue between two people who are lost in translation, although, some how, both individuals find themselves speaking the same language. The witty screenplay by Kureishi (an author whose novel The Buddha of Suburbia was a novel I read in University) allows the internal thoughts of the characters to be read easily by the viewers and allow the actions of our characters to speak volumes. A city roaming with mimes, colourful characters and whacky personas, Meg and Nick find themselves lusting for the city of Paris to revive their emotions and expectations of one another.

It may not seem it, but aside from the fury and disagreements that Meg and Nick deal with, Le Week-End reminds viewers that "love is the only interesting thing" left in life, especially when you reach the age of our cinematic specimens. The answer may be love, but the factors determining this answer are the tools for the equation. Luckily for Michell, his lead couple is a pair of talented actors who devour their characters, expelling a familiarity of relationship woes between long-term couples and deteriorating lovers. Broadbent offers a special variation of the typical, artistic, working class Englishman. Full of well-upholstered manners, true English nuances and faint hints of British humour, he uses all of these subtle character traits to bring to life the habitual sexual urges of a man who has waited long enough to touch his naturally ageing, beautiful wife.

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