CIFF Review: Le Week-End

“Le Week-End” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. The movie will be released in America in March 2014.

 Film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in a tweet that Lindsay Duncan’s character in “Le Week-end” would be the splitting image of “Before Midnight’s” Celine if only she was 15 years older and British. Not only is Roger Michell’s film on the realistic trajectory for where Jesse and Celine might end up two films from where they are now, “Le Week-end” crackles with the intelligence, realism and charm of Richard Linklater’s masterpiece of a trilogy.

And yet unlike “Before Midnight,” Michell’s film dares to make philosophical expressions of love and marriage into something other than talky and dour. It’s a brisk comedy with a spark for life and lunacy, and it hits a perfect note of authenticity between the chemistry of its two leads.

Jim Broadbent and Duncan play Richard and Meg Burroughs, a married couple of 30 years on vacation in Paris for their anniversary. Upon arriving at their dingy shoebox of a hotel, Meg immediately storms out and grabs a taxi to a luxurious Paris institution, doing so with a superficial, yet lovingly sophisticated confidence to always get her way.

Richard tags along like a sheep dog, at first appearing only concerned about money the way all cliché old men do in the movies. But after they’re well settled in and he’s stopped caring, he reveals that he’s been forced into retirement after an off-color comment about one of his students.

It’s just one of many complications in their marriage, one that leads Meg to question whether or not after 30 years she still wants to be with Richard. They bicker over their deadbeat son and why they don’t have sex anymore, but they do so with a sly, witty understanding of one another that shows at least why they belong as friends.

That blur between joie de vivre and marital bitterness colors “Le Week-end” with mystique and dignity. They wander the city and dine and dash at an upscale establishment, but they’re constantly grounded in how challenging even this frivolity has become.

“I’m amazed how mediocre I’ve turned out to be,” Richard says with a laugh. Broadbent nails this feeling of old age acceptance while still mournfully wondering what all went wrong. In one late night scene he listens to Bob Dylan on his iPod and tipsily sings along. It’s a clumsy, awkward and funny image that in just a few shots Michell transforms into something poignant about growing old. Broadbent’s stance is feeble, his eyes lost, but still he seems to be caught up in the spirit of things.

For as great as Duncan is just oozing charm all over the screen, Broadbent steals the show in a climactic monologue. It’s a heavy realization that to some extent his intellect and his personality is a fraud and his marriage may be for naught, but it brushes aside the self-seriousness to reach cynically smart ideas that feel much more real.

“Le Week-end” is a movie that believes in the care-free morals of dozens of films but does so with none of the pretension or schmaltz. It’s a masterpiece of tone and chemistry, and you get the idea if Jesse and Celine can talk and joke half as well as Richard and Meg in 20 years, they’ll turn out alright.