Meg and Nick (Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent), a sixtyish British married couple, have gone to Paris to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Upon arriving at the Montmarte hotel they recalled from a previous visit, Meg dubs it entirely unsuitable; "It's . . . beige," she spits, and Nick, not horrified at all but wanting to oblige his wife, muses that "there's a certain light-brown-ness about it." One expensive cab ride later, they're at a far more expensive, and expansive, hotel, in the fanciest suite, with the Eiffel Tower right out the window.
Much better.
In Le Week-End, director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) and writer Hanif Kureishi (who teamed up with Michell for the 2006 Peter O'Toole vehicle Venus) explore what happens when you arrive at the inflection point between two phases of life, and aren't sure you're in the right place. Or that you've arrived there with the right person. What do you do, in other words, if you get to where you were going, and realize there's a "certain light-brown-ness" about it?
Music Box FilmsI've read a lot of articles about how we millennials are discovering, as we reach young adulthood, that we're not as special as our parents and teachers have always told us. Most of us, it turns out, are just profoundly ordinary people. We'll marry other ordinary people, live in ordinary house, have ordinary jobs and ordinary children and conventional white picket fences. (The resulting quarterlife crisis is well chronicled in the HBO show Girls.)
And yet still we crave newness and hate the idea of commitment, so we drift around carelessly from job to job, partner to partner, city to city, church to church. We're unmoored, allergic to limits, and we like it that way.
If the pundits are to be believed, this is just another example of How Entitled The Young Folk Are and How the Decline of Civilization As We Know It Is Imminent. But if Le Week-End is to be believed, this isn't just an affliction for the young. Le Week-End is about what it takes to stay married to someone for decades, about the nature of long-term intimate commitment, and about coming to terms with our limiting choices.
Nick and Meg, now ensconced in their nicer suite, are alone with one another for what seems like the first time in decades. They are new empty nesters. Over dinner, Nick reluctantly tells Meg some news he's been holding back: due to a run-in with a student, the college administration has forced him into early retirement. Meg's tired of her job. They're bored with their lives. And while Nick is hopelessly dependent upon and still very much infatuated with his still-beautiful wife ("A man who still wants to make love to his wife?" he jokes. "It's unusual, if not a far-out perversion"), Meg's not so sure she likes being shackled to him any longer.
But in Paris, anything is possible, a fact underlined when Nick and Meg (after a dine-and-dash adventure) run into Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), an old friend from their anarchic, activist student days who instantly invites them to a dinner party the next day. He's a successful writer of the most caricatured type: bestsellers, teenage son from another marriage, ostentatiously sophisticated flat ("what beautiful hell is this," Nick whispers on walking in), young, adoring, very pregnant French wife.
Music Box FilmsBut he still idolizes Nick, or rather the erudite, passionate Nick who inspired him to take political action and the life of the mind seriously decades before, a point he makes to Nick's obvious discomfort. By his own admission to Meg earlier in the day, Nick remembers how full of potential his life has been, and so is amazed by how "mediocre" he actually turned out to be.
It's to the serious credit of Michell, Kureishi, and the cast that it's hard for me to summarize this plot without the movie sounding hokey and/or sappy, when in fact it is neither. What seems like a well-worn plot that could go one of two ways (couple rekindles romance beneath the Eiffel Tower, for goodness' sake, or couple decides this is the end while in the most romantic city in the world—irony!) actually does neither.
Meg and Nick's relationship is the right kind of complicated, the sort that comes from years and years of living with someone else's flaws and successes, knowing them inside out, understanding their foibles, knowing which buttons to push. They joke and laugh and lean on one another, and then turn around and bicker.
We get the sense they've been doing this for thirty years, but that something has changed. "You make my blood boil like nobody else," Meg spits at Nick in a church. "It's the sign of a deep connection!" he protests playfully, before realizing that she's not joking around anymore.
And yet Meg knows how to destroy Nick over and over with tiny cruel comments and, probably more importantly, by withholding any physical intimacy for what apparently has been quite some time, despite her husband's increasingly self-degrading pleas. ("Can I touch you?" he asks. "What for?" she replies coldly.) Yet he keeps trying, and Broadbent's eyes as he bleeds and then recovers, over and over, will break your heart.
Music Box FilmsAt Morgan's dinner party, Meg escapes to the balcony and is followed by a younger male guest, who asks her (by way of seduction) what she's thinking about. As they stare out at the city lights, she replies that she's thinking about her own predicament, a woman of a certain age beholden to "boredom, dissatisfaction, fury, and the clock ticking by."
"What a great thing," he replies. "To be so attuned to your own unhappiness."
Meg and Nick are both attuned to their own unhappiness, and both know the reasons for it: the challenges presented by the choices they've made in the past. The choice to marry each other. The choice to take the stable jobs rather than chasing fame. The choices that landed them here, in Paris, with one another, after thirty years.
Morgan, by contrast, picked up and left when he was unhappy, started over, and will do it again and again, we're pretty sure. His choices don't limit him (it's hardly accidental that his character is American). But we're meant to see this as a selfish, narcissistic act; even if Morgan himself isn't a bad guy, he's silly and carelessly cruel.
The movie's trajectory is a slow slide into sadness that takes a fascinating, ambiguous turn toward the light by the end, and the final scene in particular is perfect. The camera drifts around occasionally, lending a sort of impressionist atmosphere to a movie that could have been played as a straight dark romantic comedy. All of this elevates Le Week-End to the level of intelligent film without sacrificing humor, bite, and beauty, all of which it has in scads.
"Nothing's gone yet," Meg says to Nick early in the film—referring in this case to their aging bodies, and to everything else, too—and it seems by the end that Paris has changed them. How, it's not clear—but it would be a far worse film if we did. For now, like Meg and Nick, we wonder what the future holds, and how what they choose now changes that.
Caveat Spectator
Le Week-End involves a fair bit of dirty language between married people, including crude and/or explicit references to sex and human anatomy. There's also quite a bit of profanity of the f-bomb sort, though nothing incredibly offensive to mature audiences. A character considers going out for drinks and, it's strongly implied, more, with another person to whom they are not married. Divorce is discussed. There is some fairly illegal behavior here and there. If you liked Notting Hill, then Le Week-End is for you.
Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today's chief film critic. She is also an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City and editor of QIdeas.org. She tweets @alissamarie.
