This year saw the release of Before Midnight, the third part in Richard Linklater’s continuing romantic saga which caught us up with the relationship of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s Jesse and Celine some 18 years after they first met on a train in Europe. Now Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Enduring Love, Venus) brings us Le Week-End which centres around another duo wandering around a romantic setting of their own. And while it may not have the timeless quality of Linklater’s near-perfect trilogy, it nonetheless has the ability to get to some sort of truth.
The plot follows long married couple Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) who decide to take a trip to Paris both to celebrate their wedding anniversary and try to rejuvenate their waning marriage. Once there, the bickering starts about everything from which hotel they’re going to stay at to the meaning of their relationship now that their kids have grown up and left home. As they walk around The City of Light they eventually bump into an old friend of Nick’s whose invitation of hospitality leads to getting their true feelings out in the open.
It’s a slight but charming affair that has a gentle, inviting quality but it’s given some real dramatic heft by its candidness surrounding the ills of getting older and being with the same person for decades, as well by the two evenly matched performances of Broadbent and Duncan. Helped by its rough around the edges approach, you almost feel as if you’re watching a real married couple bicker and quip about joy and sadness, love and hate, why their trip to Paris may have been a mistake or the only thing to save their marriage and so forth. The whole thing plays out the line uttered by Nick about it not being possible to not love and hate someone at the same time when married, “usually within the space of five minutes.”
On the surface the film is a light and fluffy rom-com with, let’s be honest, the gimmick that it’s an older couple instead of two good-looking Hollywood A-listers but the proof of severity is in the pudding. It’s the caustic verbal ping-pong between the two about their simultaneous fondness and resentment for one another that really makes Le Week-End spark. The pleasure is in the highlighting of all those little mundane details and life truths which accentuate the believability of the relationship.
As much as it digs at the heart of the joys and troubles of long-term commitment, there’s also an angle of broad humour to it that sometimes works in its favour but occasionally undoes some of the hard work the film has put in up until that point. The two of them trying to escape a restaurant without paying, for example, is played for broad laughs but it’s particularly the case when Jeff Goldblum turns up about half-way through as one of Broadbent’s former University classmates. He’s larger than life in a way that only Goldblum can be and while he provides for some of the films more entertaining scenes, it sort of pulls you out of the central drama.
The ramshackle, meandering, almost unsophisticated approach makes it come across as unfocused at times but that’s also part of the charm of the whole thing. This insightful comedy drama is at its strongest when it focuses solely on the main duo and thankfully Broadbent and Duncan’s brilliant performances are there to carry the film squarely on their shoulders and, most importantly, make you believe in their well-worn love-hate relationship. In that respect the film succeeds at what it sets out to do.
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Le Week-End is released in UK cinemas on October 11th.