Review: Le Week-End
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: B+] Although it's played with the airy lightness of a comedy, Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi's film draws real blood, and not just metaphorically.
THE FRENCH DISCONNECTION: A long-married couple revisits the site of their honeymoon only to rekindle old feuds in Le Week-End.
City Paper grade: B+
Meg (Lesley Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent) have been married long enough to know all of each other’s weak spots, and during what’s meant to be a revivifying few days in Paris they jab at them relentlessly. Although it’s played with the airy lightness of a comedy, Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi’s film — the third, after The Mother and Venus, in what they’ve retroactively dubbed a trilogy on aging and sex — draws real blood, and not just metaphorically. The couple’s barbed banter starts off adorably prickly: He’s proud he found the hotel they stayed in during their honeymoon; she thinks it’s a dump and refuses to set foot inside. But before long it’s clear there’s real enmity between them. Meg is a ball of anger, a skin stretched tight across a deep well of hurt, and Nick is puppyish past the point where it’s pathetic, importuning her for sex and later begging for “just a sniff.” Duncan and Broadbent — as well as Jeff Goldblum, who comes on the scene later as an old friend with a new life — play Kureishi’s acid dialogue with briskness and brittleness. You feel the spite, and gradually you come to see that their tumultuousness is a sign of life; they’re still actively working out how they feel about each other, for worse and for better. Taking his cues from the French New Wave, and explicitly tipping his hat to Band of Outsiders on numerous occasions, Michell works fast and loose, in a limber style pointedly at odds with the snoozy languor of most late-life romances. Nick and Meg aren’t easy to get close to, even for the audience. Kureishi deliberately leaves us to reverse-engineer the origins of their long-standing grievances, as if the hurt has lingered after its source has vanished from memory. But it’s worth enjoying — and enduring — their company, if only for one of the most rapturous finales in recent memory.
