Le Week-End
As audiences wait for Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke to reunite for another love-soaked stroll through a European city, Le Week-End is more than a fine placeholder. The drama, the fourth collaboration between screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette) and director Roger Michel (Notting Hill), is sweet and salty in equal measure.
It follows two septuagenarians spending a weekend in Paris to mark their 30th anniversary. The husband is Nick Burrows (Jim Broadbent), a weary professor who was recently sacked from his post. His wife, Meg (Lindsay Duncan), is even more bitter, fussy and looking for her own freedom. Over three days in Paris, they are happy and miserable, falling in love again and fighting over miniscule matters. The first sip of the Burrows’ life was intoxicating, but now they’re reaching the end of the bottle many years later, when the drink is not as tasty.
The film benefits from two masterfully poised character actors at the top of their game. Broadbent drags years of regret and wanting on his face. Late in the film, he tears into his wife while explaining how much she means to him, delivering cutting lines with a drained demeanor but also rousing emotion. Duncan, who also has a key role in Birdman this year, is terrific as a woman trying to cling onto the shreds of passion she once possessed. Although she can be spiteful toward Nick, she is rarely unsympathetic.
Intimate and sharply written, Le Week-End is caught in the middle between the dialogue-rich Before trilogy and the humanism and leisurely pace of a Mike Leigh drama. The constantly shifting tone, between joy and resentment, may catch some people off; however, since it syncs up with the bipolar nature of married life, it all works.