Le Week-End (2013)

Usually when movies use Paris as a romantic backdrop, it's a young couple who gets to occupy the foreground. Not so with "Le Week-End," a tale of two aging tourists - he a professor of philosophy, she a teacher - who've chosen to "celebrate" their 30th anniversary in (where else? ) the City of Lights.

Like many couples who have been together for a long time, Nick and Meg Burroughs often seem to have more things that are driving them apart than bringing them together. Not only have they grown tired of each other's all-too-predictable habits and quirks, but Meg, in particular, feels that now, with the kids grown and gone, it may be time for the two of them to move on and to spend what little time they have left getting to know themselves as individuals rather than as a couple.

Because the screenplay by Hanif Kureishi is clearly focused on an older couple, the film captures the paradox that exists at the core of lasting romantic love: that the very same predictable patterns and dull routines that, over time, work to deaden love are also what enhance intimacy and bind us inexorably to one another over the long haul.

Though Meg and Nick are still clearly sexual beings, even that fact has caused some tension and division between them, namely in an affair Nick had awhile back and for which he is perpetually atoning. Yet, the script is smart enough to know that what is said in the heat of the moment is not always indicative of what is in the heart.

Much of the second half of the film takes place at a posh and pretentious dinner party thrown by an old college buddy of Nick's, an American author and intellectual played by Jeff Goldblum.

Director Roger Michell keeps the tone serious and intimate without becoming heavy-handed or preachy. He allows the characters to reveal their depth through conversation and the way they interact with the world and each other. He is aided immeasurably by the skilled and incisive performances of Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, who make us truly believe that they are a couple who have grown both comfortable and complacent with one another over time. Above all, "Le Week-End" acknowledges that relationships are tricky and complex things and come with no pat or easy instructions to make them easier to navigate our way through.

After "Le Week-End," it may not be necessary for Richard Linklater to make another "BeforeÂ…" movie, after all. I think Kureishi and Michell might have done it already.

Fmovies: Oh Paris, je t'aime!

What do you get when you mix the influence of French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard, the acting talents of Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, the sturdy direction of Roger Michell and poised writing of Hanif Kureishi? What feels like the unofficial fourth entry to the Before Sunrise independent film trilogy, Le Week-End is a film that could easily be mistaken as the extended look at the lives of Jesse and Celine, years after their fateful meeting in Vienna.

There is something exquisite and magical with films set in Paris, a city that is most commonly known as the 'city of love'. And although Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick Burroughs (Jim Broadbent) choose to revisit Paris after thirty years of marriage and re-live their honeymoon after a long and challenging life together, things don't exactly go how each of them planned. Instead, what surfaces is a film budding with sophistication, film history, and bittersweet revelations that showcase a world of fading lovers and seasoned couples.

Le Week-End is a film set in the fine wine capital of the world. Surrounded by couples holding hands, sharing moments of pure love and wonder, Meg and Nick have some serious marital issues to face, but instead decide to lather over them with the spectacular sights and sounds of the Eiffel Tower, the River Seine and upper-class dining and accommodations. Both highly irritated with each other's approach to life, their children and their relationship as a whole, Meg and Nick use the vacation as a means to reconnect. However, the couple unexpectedly run-into one of Nick's former student's and now renown author Morgan (Jeff Goldblum). Morgan invites Meg and Nick to a dinner party to celebrate the release of Morgan's latest literary achievement. However, Meg and Nick get a lot more than just dinner among friends, and instead their evening turns into a plethora of ultimatums and heartfelt realities.

The grand beauty of Le Week-End lies in the chemistry between Broadbent and Duncan. As two educators in their own sense, Nick a university professor and Meg a teacher, the two honeymooners surely belong to a class of people who are in constant pursuit of life experiences. Sadly, the couple, who have lived their lives catering to the needs of others, can't seem to get rid of their overly mature son, who has found his way back to basement of their home. Torn between what is right and what is necessary, Nick and Meg's parental approach is clearly outlined in the short snippets of calls Nick receives from their son. Thankfully, the heart of Le Week-End is easily found, not in the commentary of parenting, but in the depth of fleeting love, and Duncan and Broadbent share a hate to love for one another that could only be seen in some of the misunderstood, post modern works of European artists almost sixty years prior.

Meg and Nick use their thirty year wedding anniversary as a muse towards re-connecting. Meg, seeing the vacation as a 'last chance at love' for her and her husband, adopts a very go with the flow, careless attitude towards their spending and experiences in the Parisian city. Early on, it is clear that Nick is the money saver and principle earner in the relationship. While Nick sees Paris as an escape from their mundane lives in Birmingham, he also sees it as an opportunity to indulge in a weekend filled with romance and wild, kinky sex with his gorgeous wife–whom he still very much loves and longs for. Meg on the other hand is mostly repulsed wit

Le Week-End (2013) is an English film directed by Roger Michell. Lindsay Duncan plays Meg, married to Nick (Jim Broadbent). They've been married for quite a while--probably 35 years or so. They aren't a happy couple, and they decide to return to Paris for a weekend to try to relive a time when they were happy.

The problem is that they don't like the hotel they can afford, and they can't afford the hotel they like. They don't like the restaurants they can afford, and they can't afford the restaurants they like. And . . . they don't appear to like each other very much either.

Nick was apparently very successful in college and graduate school. However, he has never fulfilled his early academic promise. At one point Meg tells someone, "I'm a teacher," but it wasn't clear to me what she taught, and at what level she taught it. And, more important, it wasn't clear that she derived any satisfaction from her work.

By coincidence, they meet Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), who lives in Paris. Morgan and Nick had been friends in graduate school. In fact, Morgan says that he considered Nick his mentor. However, unlike Nick, Morgan has had a fabulously successful academic career. He now has abundant funds, a new bestseller, and a young second wife who adores him. The contrast between Nick's life and Morgan's life is so obvious that it brings about revelations from Nick that are painful to hear.

I was prepared to enjoy this movie, but, ultimately, it didn't work for me. Jim Broadbent is a fine actor, as is Lindsay Duncan. But neither of them gave me much reason to care about them--as individuals, or as a couple. Having a meal in an expensive restaurant, and then sneaking out through the kitchen is supposed to be a charming exploit. I don't find it to be charming at all. In fact, I didn't find much that was charming about either of them. (Yes--Lindsay Duncan is very beautiful, and looks much younger than her actual age of 63. But that doesn't make her character charming.)

I kept waiting for the characters in the movie to come to some sort of resolution. However, that didn't happen. The film just dwindled away and then it ended. "Loved the concept," but the movie never delivered on what it promised. Too bad.

Le Week-End fmovies. College lecturer Nick and schoolteacher Meg (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) take the TGV to Paris for their 30th wedding anniversary. He still dotes on her, but she's had the seven-year-itch for at least 23 years. She insists on moving to a more ritzy hotel and makes it plain she'd like to move on to a more ritzy husband. They run into an old college chum of Nick's (Jeff Goldblum) who's got a new young wife. A party at his apartment confirms Meg in her feeling that life has short- changed her.

This sour take on the middle-aged romcom is scripted by Hanif Kureishi in the style of Woody Allen. It has no more substance than a 30-minute TV sitcom - a cross between AS TIME GOES BY and ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE - which is stretched a bit thin at 93 minutes. The best scene involves a restaurant bill they can't afford, but the joke falls flat when it's repeated in the hotel. Jeff Goldblum phones in another variant on his usual rich rogue persona. Jim Broadbent's Nick is a solid if predictable take on Victor Meldrew. Lindsay Duncan's Meg is the best thing in the movie, a partially tamed shrew who thinks - wrongly - that she could have, should have, done better. Married couples - maybe even unmarried couples - may find this film leaves a bitter taste; I think it's meant to.

Apparently a lot of viewers approached this film with expectations. I had none. I didn't even know about the film prior to attending the screening.

These characters sound and move like real humans. This is not a film about Paris, this is a film about people, aging, mistakes regrets, anger, secrets, affection, thorniness, misbehavior and loyalty.

I've read the complaints of other lay reviewers and it's apparent that they should make their own films, because it's doubtful anyone else's will live up to their expectations -- especially if critics like it.

They should also remember that it is remarkably difficult to pronounce something as snobbish without sounding intensely condescending.

Don't expect a romantic comedy from this picture, it has traces of comedy, very short hints of romance, but it is more a sharp, although sometimes really funny, reflection on the difficulty of giving sparkle to a marriage, after 30 years of mutual endurance. There's still love between Meg and Nick, but with so many ups and downs, mainly from Meg's part, who once seems to want to leave her husband, and then is terrified when she does not see him in their bed. And then Nick, terrified of being deserted by her wife, and ready to enjoy every short minute she seems to be willing to love him. It is a movie about the difficulty of living together, mainly when we have to come to terms with the failures of our individual life, of the need to feel that we could individually start everything anew. So, the movie progresses or better drags itself along the cobbled streets of Paris, through the sharp, sometimes brutal bickering of this funny couple, which is not always easy for the viewer to endure, in particular when dialogues seem to be a little pretentious and to be proclaiming some universal truth about marriages and living together, thus sounding a little more didactic and philosophical than realistic. I think the last ten minutes of the movie give a final intense and authentic touch, which could have started or been emphasized earlier. However, I appreciated the effective chemistry of the two main actors, they are carefully devised as not to result stereotyped and their interpretations proved really deep and heartfelt.