Married? You’ll wince at this weekend in Paris
Le Week-end (15) Verdict: Weekend break . . . or break-up? ★★★★✩
MY WIFE and I are about to go to Paris for three days, and I’m not sure that seeing Le Week-End was the ideal preparation.
It is the tale of Meg and Nick Burrows, on their first visit to Paris since their honeymoon 30 years earlier, who travel in the hope of reigniting a long-extinguished romance but first unpack a suitcase full of frustrations and irritations, recriminations and regrets. The baggage, in other words, of a long marriage. There is also the steadying weight of love, but are they asking too much of the weekend, and indeed of Paris?
The portents don’t look good. Even on the Eurostar across, Meg (Lindsay Duncan) becomes exasperated with Nick (Jim Broadbent). And her exasperation grows when his first romantic gesture backfires like a dodgy velomoteur. He has booked them into their old honeymoon hotel in Montmartre . . . but it’s a dump.
So Meg disregards his protests and installs them in a swanky five-star establishment they can’t even begin to afford: she’s a teacher, while he is a philosophy lecturer who, he haltingly reveals to her over dinner, has just been fired.
They disagree about pretty much everything. He would like more sex, she wouldn’t. He thinks they should let their feckless son live with them, she doesn’t. He thinks she might be having an affair; she isn’t. Never mind rekindled romance — will the marriage even survive the weekend?
We just don’t know, even though there are moments of touching accord, and a lovely scene in which, turning back the years to a carefree youth, they scarper from a restaurant without paying the bill. Duncan and Broadbent are wonderful, especially Duncan, whose eyes alone could educate an entire drama school.
But in a two-hander there is always the risk that claustrophobia might set in, so it comes as a faint relief when Nick’s American protege from Cambridge undergraduate days, Morgan (the equally wonderful Jeff Goldblum), enters the story.
His academic career has been as successful as Nick’s has been disappointing, a fact which becomes clear at a momentous dinner party at his chic apartment — where he lives with his young, pregnant, and, of course, chic French wife.
It’s the third big-screen collaboration between director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi, and it’s their best so far.
It is an engrossing portrait of a long marriage. I don’t think it’s entirely a portrait of my long marriage, but no middle-aged couple will be able to watch it without sharp winces of recognition.
I think I might keep my wife away from it, until we’re safely back at St Pancras.