Le Week-End (2014)

Pretentious drivel. How on earth did they manage to spend so much making this film? Absolutely nothing to recommend it - not even Jim and Jeff's great talents could drag it beyond the banale.

Meg & Nick are a middle-class couple travelling for a nostalgic trip to Paris. The first brief scene on the Eurostar sets the tone, a couple who bicker & get on each other's nerves.Paris, the city of lovers becomes an ironic background for a couple whose sense of familiarity brings contempt. A young couple walk hand-in-hand as Meg & Nick sit bickering. Paris, though, also represents the Bohemian, radical ideas & sexual liberation.Each manages to push & press the buttons that winds the other up. Meg hurts Nick physically, once in a scene that had me genuinely roaring as she pushes him away when he wants to spank her & he falls over on the cobbles, hurting his knee. As the film reaches the final act, there is a danger that she might hurt him emotionally. I didn't pick up all the Beckettian nuances on a first viewing but there are there: the (obvious) visit to the dramatist's grave at Montparnasse; the quotation; & Nick's montage containing his photo in the hotel.The first Act revolves around them walking around Paris, a visit to a restaurant before an escapade leads to the turning point where Nick bumps into an old college acquaintance, Morgan (excellently played by Goldblum). Morgan has an exciting Parisian lifestyle as a published author; a younger wife smitten with him; & a glittering circle of interesting friends. The two men even look different: one suave, smartly casual, a bundle of energy, the other bearded, bespectacled & weather-beaten. Morgan is a gourmand tucking into life with zest. At the party, Meg meets Jean Pierre, who offers the glimpse of another more radical possibility.In the final act, Meg & Nick are apart, underlining the gap between them following an argument provoked by Nick's jealousy. Meg's rancour is an antidote to Eve's, (Morgan's current wife), gushing idealism. Meanwhile, Nick encounters a teenager in his bedroom away from the party, who turns out to be Morgan's son from his first marriage. The two bond. This scene is pivotal. Nick lets slip his love & need for Meg just at the point when it looks like she could hurt him. The final set-piece is Nick's self-deprecating confessional at the dinner-table where he swats aside Morgan's effusive praise of him to reveal the true state of things in his life. What shines through is Nick's authenticity, "The self I hide in myself" & in that moment, we see that the core of the man Meg fell in love with, remains. As in 'Waiting for Godot', it's like optimism & pessimism being shackled together (The characters in Words & Music are perhaps more appropriate, the source of the quotation. I'm not familiar with the play but Nick is associated with music, Bob Dylan & Nick Drake) . Misery is funny. Yet the great tragic absurdist is also quoted by Nick on love: "Do we mean love when we say love?' The film is about a lot of darkness before the light. There is more to love. Meg is cool & detached yet she feeds Nick her soup in the first restaurant where he sits contentedly: "This is where I want to be forever." Meg soon undercuts this feeling of well-being. Before the party, she picks out a suave blazer with care. And at the party following Nick's confessional, she makes a confession of her own that salvages things between them. This becomes a positive end of sorts, though Kureishi in the foreword to his script states the end is provisional "& the questions they ask have to be confronted repeatedly".The film is, in many ways, a two-hander, a study of a marriage where each partner may want something different from the other depending on their temperament. The performances by Broadbent & Duncan capture the nuances of each of their characters. It is a suitable companion piece to Julie Delphy's witty 'Two Days in Paris". Delpy even looks like a younger Lindsay Duncan, with high cheek bones & luminous porcelain skin & cool demeanour . In that film, Delpy plays a Parisian with a neurotic American boyfriend so that the film is also about cross continent relations. Like 'Le Weekend', the couple too face an emotional turning point, and both end with each couple dancing, a temporary resolution immersed in the moment.

Right from the start,"Le Week - end" pins its colours to the mast.That Miles Davis soundalike ultra - cool 1950s jazz,the sharp close - ups,the moving cameras,yes folks it's a retro nouvelle vague picture but instead of Moreau or Belmondo it has stolid old Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan as pension - age Brits stumbling(literally in his case) around movie - cliché Paris apparently in a bid to save a thirty year marriage that's about as salvageable as the "Titanic". The dialogue has that Oxbridge veneer of cleverness that you just know would never be delivered by any human being except on late - night TV shows replete with smug intellectuals greedy for Channel Four's money.Even Mr Broadbent with his hurt Labrador eyes looks as if he is trying to get his words out as quickly as possible to get it over with. Miss Duncan - his shrewish wife(and if I'm being unkind to shrews I herewith apologise) dons a false smile occasionally but is as unpleasant in her own way as Miss Thora Hird in "A kind of loving". She is the kind of woman who would shrivel a man's gonads at a glance,except for poor old Jim who returns to the scene of the crime like a whipped cur. Mr J.Goldblum has lines even smarter and his New York Intellectual schtick is amusing in his first scene but quickly deteriorates into parody. He plays Jim's old Cambridge buddy(natch),quite possible his alter - ego if you want to go into things a bit more deeply - which I didn't. I bet he liked the soundtrack as he's a nifty jazz pianist himself. Not funny,not dramatic,not romantic,"Le Week - end" joins the legion of British films that flash across the sky like a comet to disappear and come back in five hundred years time when large brains welded to wheelchairs may well wave their tentacles in delight and proclaim it as a masterpiece. It is the sort of film that lends credence to M.Truffaut's oft - quoted maxim that the words "British" and "Cinema" should not be uttered in the same breath. Something that will never be said about him.

Oh my goodness. We wanted to give up on this movie the whole way through. It was slow and we had a hard time connecting enough with the characters to want to watch them. We understood their angst, but they weren't likable enough to want to devote 1h30m of our lives to watching. The language was below par and the screenplay was one annoying thing after another. We made the mistake of watching it on Netflix instead of DVD. On DVD we could have watched on fast-forward. BUT.. We really like these actors and we really liked the beautiful camera shots of Paris and throwing a Tom Petty song in there helped too, so we stuck with it. The story basically shows a double nervous breakdown and the last few minutes of the film were finally fun and lovely. We'd like to see what happens next in the story, as long as that story moves along a bit quicker and the language is more appealing.