LE WEEK-END B+
Perhaps Woody Allen’s decision to globetrot throughout
Europe to make films has had a bigger effect than we realized, beginning in
England with MATCH POINT (2005), and continuing for eight years through Spain,
Paris, and Rome, as this audience-pleasing film originates with Allen’s mix of
comedy and tragedy while immersing his characters in self-deprecating humor. English director Roger Michell, collaborating
for the fourth time with screenwriter Hanhif Kureishi, has similarly produced
an intelligently written comic romance with tragic overtones, all set in the
streets of Paris for a couple’s 30th wedding anniversary, which offers both
hope and the possibilities of renewal, but also the chance that it could all be
coming to an end. The featured actors
express an unusually wide range of emotions with career defining roles,
including the dependable and ever reliable Jim Broadbent as Nick and his late
blooming wife Meg, Lindsay Duncan, both probably in their 60’s. Their lives have been defined by work and
responsibility, where little time has been spent on their precarious
relationship, as they’ve been too busy to think about themselves. As is often the case, people have differing
expectations when they reach retirement age, as Meg is interested in starting
anew, learning to play the piano, to try several new languages, or how to dance
the Tango, a life where she’ll continually be challenged, while Nick feels a
bit overwhelmed by all that ambition, as together they can’t even decide what
kind of tiles to use for their bathroom repair.
But what’s immediately evident is the skillful interplay between the two
characters, where they no longer hide their feelings behind polite standards of
convention, but simply blurt out whatever they feel at the moment, often
devastatingly blunt and hurtful, while at other times they melt in each other’s
arms.
From the moment they arrive in Paris, they sense trouble, as
the hotel where they spent their honeymoon 30 years ago is a bit shabby and
rundown, causing them to immediately shift gears, taking a whirlwind cab ride
through Paris pointing out the sites before stopping in front of the most
prestigious hotel they’ve seen, which is booked solid except for their most
luxurious suite, the one Tony Blair stayed at when visiting Paris. So they throw caution to the wind and forget
about money for a change, as the Eiffel Tower view from the balcony couldn’t be
more intoxicating, and instead they enjoy walking through the streets, seeing
the sites, and choosing elegant restaurants with elaborately designed meals. With their marriage at stake, what’s
continuously on display is a choreography of mood swings, creating a dangerous
minefield to negotiate with both dropping bombs on each other while also having
to face the onslaught of incoming fire, mired in a build-up of petty resentments
that suddenly have an easy target, as if both are wearing bulls eyes on their
backs, where the petty bickering can be deeply
disturbing or laceratingly funny, as they continue to get themselves into
ridiculous situations. Their ongoing sarcasm
is both deadly accurate but also self-protective, as it’s easy to hide behind
humor. Nonetheless, Nick is under the
assumption that Meg intends to leave him, where for him the idea of facing the
future alone feels doomed from the outset, where he continually expresses his
love for her, but sadly Meg just leaves him hanging. While Nick was a progressive activist in his
youth turned into a middle aged, largely ignored philosophy professor, it’s
clear the fire has gone out of their marriage, where Nick pleads and bargains
for a hint of sex that never comes, as if Meg keeps it locked in a storage
vault, a throwback to the more prudish Victorian times when women wore chastity
belts.
While the film is a theatrical unraveling of a long
drawn-out bitterness that has developed between them, they’re also seen running
through the streets like young carefree adolescents, even cleverly escaping
from an upscale restaurant without paying the bill, where they’re reverting to
behavior from an earlier age, as if this will somehow jumpstart their romance
and rejuvenate their marriage. Bearing a
similarity to a younger but equally endangered married couple in Richard
Linklater’s Before
Midnight (2013), or Roberto Rossellini’s seethingly angry divorce among the
ruins film Journey
to Italy (1954), the common ingredient in each is the raging female
disappointment both in the men they married and the emptiness of their lives,
where the towering performances by women, including Lindsay Duncan’s superbly realized
exposé of middle age fears creeping into her life, are powerful indicators of
the kind of searing dramatic intensity that can be shown through intelligently
written middle-aged dramas. While Nick
amusingly listens to Dylan on his headset sneering “How does it feel…to be on your own?” Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling
Stone (Live 1966) YouTube (4:19), perhaps
hoping to recapture the boldness of youth, there are also images playing on the
hotel television of Godard’s 1964 film BAND OF OUTSIDERS (Bande à Part),
showing the freewheeling young heroes Running through the Louvre YouTube (53
seconds), a display of their rebellious energy.
The film loses some of its brutal honesty, however, in its insistence to
remain commercially entertaining, to remain audience friendly, where there’s a
dinner scene ripe for the kind of mad chaos inspired by Maurice Pialat, for
instance, in À
Nos Amours (To Our Loves) (1983), where 60-year olds never express such a
burst of liberating pandemonium, where instead a humiliatingly awkward scene is
toned down and given a polite return to maturity, but not before they have a
chance to spontaneously restage the infamous jukebox scene with Anna Karina
dancing the Madison, a scene that needs no subtitling, Café! Dance scene from Bande à Part (1964) on
Vimeo (4:05). Despite personally impactive
scenes of confessional honesty, the film also plays out like a working-class
fantasy, imagining what might happen if you had a chance to repair your broken
marriage by spending the weekend in one of the most upscale hotels in
Paris.
