Un week-end à Paris

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.

Le Week-End (2013) is an English film directed by Roger Michell. Lindsay Duncan plays Meg, married to Nick (Jim Broadbent). They've been married for quite a while--probably 35 years or so. They aren't a happy couple, and they decide to return to Paris for a weekend to try to relive a time when they were happy.

The problem is that they don't like the hotel they can afford, and they can't afford the hotel they like. They don't like the restaurants they can afford, and they can't afford the restaurants they like. And . . . they don't appear to like each other very much either.

Nick was apparently very successful in college and graduate school. However, he has never fulfilled his early academic promise. At one point Meg tells someone, "I'm a teacher," but it wasn't clear to me what she taught, and at what level she taught it. And, more important, it wasn't clear that she derived any satisfaction from her work.

By coincidence, they meet Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), who lives in Paris. Morgan and Nick had been friends in graduate school. In fact, Morgan says that he considered Nick his mentor. However, unlike Nick, Morgan has had a fabulously successful academic career. He now has abundant funds, a new bestseller, and a young second wife who adores him. The contrast between Nick's life and Morgan's life is so obvious that it brings about revelations from Nick that are painful to hear.

I was prepared to enjoy this movie, but, ultimately, it didn't work for me. Jim Broadbent is a fine actor, as is Lindsay Duncan. But neither of them gave me much reason to care about them--as individuals, or as a couple. Having a meal in an expensive restaurant, and then sneaking out through the kitchen is supposed to be a charming exploit. I don't find it to be charming at all. In fact, I didn't find much that was charming about either of them. (Yes--Lindsay Duncan is very beautiful, and looks much younger than her actual age of 63. But that doesn't make her character charming.)

I kept waiting for the characters in the movie to come to some sort of resolution. However, that didn't happen. The film just dwindled away and then it ended. "Loved the concept," but the movie never delivered on what it promised. Too bad.

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.

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.

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.