Le Week-End
★★★★
Dir: Roger Michell
(2013)
Writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell turn their hand toward an ailing marriage between two teachers attempting to find a slice of the heady romantic past in the very city which is supposed to accommodate us all in this often futile search. Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan are on top form here, showing us a couple who are in equal parts, at war, in love and tentatively bored. Empty nesters who have reached the ultimate realisation. If you want a bristling romantic comedy with a happy ending then stay well clear. Michell and Kureishi offer no tear jerking finale but instead hint cynically and brilliantly at a time where everything felt new, fresh and intense with a reference so blatant it could just be a stroke of genius.
Nick and Meg smack of any older couple on route to Paris. He's looking for his boiled sweets and uncomfortably fretting about trivial details; She entertains him with a sly underlying nonchalance. They are both at ease and at war. A war which becomes apparent when Meg flips and forces them into a suite at a luxury hotel, instigating an opening of wounds, both personal and professional. It's a more morose version perhaps of where Richard Linklater's loved up couple might end up 20 years after this years stellar Before Midnight. Or as Kureishi awkwardly let slip at a press conference in San Sebastian; "Like a Woody Allen film but with jokes."
The whole piece ups a notch with a random run in with an old contemporary of Nick's in a sublime dialogue chewing Jeff Goldblum; Unhinging the couple further as they are forced to attend a pretentious self-serving dinner party. The whole thing obviously points to a melt down from both and Broadbent and Duncan certainly deliver in the closing 20 minutes but its' a sweet and oddly fitting coda recreation of Goddard's Bande à Part dance sequence which gives us enough hope for everlasting love or at least the remembrance of it; And, like Woody Allen's Annie Hall it's a notion rightly kept just far away from the finale of a romantic comedy to make it mean something.
