Le Week-End

Don't expect a romantic comedy from this picture, it has traces of comedy, very short hints of romance, but it is more a sharp, although sometimes really funny, reflection on the difficulty of giving sparkle to a marriage, after 30 years of mutual endurance. There's still love between Meg and Nick, but with so many ups and downs, mainly from Meg's part, who once seems to want to leave her husband, and then is terrified when she does not see him in their bed. And then Nick, terrified of being deserted by her wife, and ready to enjoy every short minute she seems to be willing to love him. It is a movie about the difficulty of living together, mainly when we have to come to terms with the failures of our individual life, of the need to feel that we could individually start everything anew. So, the movie progresses or better drags itself along the cobbled streets of Paris, through the sharp, sometimes brutal bickering of this funny couple, which is not always easy for the viewer to endure, in particular when dialogues seem to be a little pretentious and to be proclaiming some universal truth about marriages and living together, thus sounding a little more didactic and philosophical than realistic. I think the last ten minutes of the movie give a final intense and authentic touch, which could have started or been emphasized earlier. However, I appreciated the effective chemistry of the two main actors, they are carefully devised as not to result stereotyped and their interpretations proved really deep and heartfelt.

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.

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.

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.

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.