Le Week-End, the scabrous new dramedy from Notting Hill’s Roger Michell, is sort of like a feature-length extrapolation of the Morrissey song “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” to which a Brit like Michell is undoubtedly familiar. In the sadcore hit from 1988, Moz is on a beachside holiday, but he’s miserable, of course — praying for Armageddon to decimate the coastal town where “every day is silent and grey.”
Nick and Meg Burrows, the characters played by Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan in Le Week-End, are in a similar sort of boat, one that is on the verge of capsizing for most of the picture. They’re celebrating their 30-year wedding anniversary in Paris, but rather than offer an escape from their problems, the City of Love only magnifies them.
Nick, a college professor, waits until they’re in a chic restaurant to tell her that his resignation is imminent (thanks to a derogatory comment he made to a black student), which justifies his frequent fretting about money. Moreover, he’s sexually unsatisfied with Meg — in one exchange, his request, “May I touch you?” receives an incredulous “what for?”— and Meg is unhappy with him for other reasons. It’s clear she wants to shed him like a rattlesnake’s skin and start her life over before it’s too late do so, information she delivers over another fancy dinner they can’t pay for.
As their relationship’s seeming death spiral continues, screenwriter Hanif Kureishi gives them both plenty of regrettable, vindictive zingers, like this one from Meg, who tells her husband, “you are a postman who never knocks,” implying, and then outright stating, that he doesn’t have any balls. It’s not often, outside perhaps the plays of Edward Albee, that you get to see two loving people be so hurtful to each other.
Because, despite their fractured rhetoric, when any one of them leaves for an extended stretch of time, a yin has lost its yang, and the other panics. When two people are this joined at the hip, it may be annoying to carry the weight, but when it’s lifted, you suddenly feel rootless and very alone.
Le Week-End is a meditation on a certain kind of world-weary loneliness that one suspects only the luckiest couples avoid for life, and Nick and Meg’s wayward games of attraction and repulsion are so effective because they so accurately reflect the darker blots on the human condition. Nick and Meg don’t represent the aspirational, wish-fulfillment ethos of most Hollywood movies; they’re people we hope not to be, saying things we hope never to say, on a vacation we hope not to have.
And yet it is never less than pleasurable to spend time with them, because
Broadbent and Duncan are gifted thespians whose understanding of these people —their ability to generate infectious chemistry even when their characters are aggressively out of balance — is its own master class in acting. The subtlety, intelligence and humor they draw from Kureishi’s words, and the straightforward realism of Michell’s direction, frequently keep sentimentality and predictability at bay.
A terrific supporting performance from Jeff Goldblum as a likable but pompous American expat who reunites with Nick on a Parisian street, an exotic and jazzy score from Jeremy Sams, and delightful visual and audio references to Jean-Luc Godard and Bob Dylan — which create new contexts for both — round out the film’s charms. It doesn’t all come together with the implacable grace, the verité beauty, and the formal elegance of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, but it feels somewhat of the same piece — two people’s brief (d)rift in time in which an entire palette of emotion builds and swirls into a psychic cyclone, headed toward an uncertain future.
LE WEEK-END. Director: Roger Michell; Cast: Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Goldblum; Distributor: Music Box; Rating: R; Now playing at The Glassic Gateway Theatre in Fort Lauderdale, The Last Picture Show at Tamarac Cinema 5 and Regal South Beach Stadium 18; opens April 18 at Movies of Lake Worth, Movies of Delray, Cobb Downtown @ the Gardens 16, Regal Shadowood 16 in Boca Raton, and Living Room Theaters at FAU.