Sunday Review: Le Week-end

Philosophy, Ambiguity, and Humor

By Jonathan Price

Few films every year transcend the obvious categories and expected strategies and actually try to address the problems real people encounter in their lives, as opposed to a remake of Spider Man, another battle of World War II, or an inventive heist with many guns and the “heroes” escaping. Le Week-end (2013, directed by Roger Michell) does transcend these tired dramas. And its French-English title suggests both its location and its mixed heritage of British reticence and boredom and French liberation and sexual possibility. Even the title suggests the confusion of its heritage, since it is a legitimate phrase in France, incorporating an English phrase that is clearer and more direct than whatever French might cook up – but also a bit comic, casual, and offbeat and maybe puzzling.
    It is set in Paris as an aging British couple, Meg and Nick Burrows (played by Lindsay Duncan & Jim Broadbent), arrive to take a brief holiday before returning to their marriage and their daily lives. As the film goes on, we discover that their two children are (almost) out of the house, that Nick has been involuntarily retired (read “fired”) from his job as a college Philosophy professor, that they are both comfortable and bored with each other, though for much of the film we are never sure quite which condition predominates. Nick suspects Meg of a longtime secret affair, Meg threatens to have a drink around the corner with an attractive male, and the word divorce is mentioned.
    But there is also the atmosphere of liberation from quotidian restraints, of experimentation, even of joy in spontaneity. Meg rejects the first hotel they arrive at, where they had stayed on their honeymoon, because of beige interior and moves them to an elegant suite at a clearly more prestigious and expensive Parisian hotel. At one restaurant meal, Meg orders Nick to wait for her outside with their coats, then descends to the cellar and rummages around mysteriously until she finds an exit to the street, where they both rejoin then joyously or furtively escape, apparently, the bill. Until this point, there is no indication that they are in financial difficulty. The hunt for the first restaurant is an echo of tourist’s joy in the profusion of Parisian choices, and in the quick-cut shots declaring “too touristy,” “too empty”….

But for much of the film it’s not entirely clear what difficulty Meg and Nick are in, and that is part of its mystery and its charm. Each member of the couple is beset by reservations and critiques of the other, not so uncommon as their marriage has lengthened into years and they contemplate the ends of their careers and eventually their lives. At times they seem radically incompatible and dissatisfied with each other, but frequently they are as chummy as well-adjusted thieves.
    Another restaurant scene shows the wife experiencing supreme joy in her carefully chosen soup as she tastes it then shares a taste with her husband. She also offers him a kind of treat, taking him to the Paris cemetery where some of his heroes are buried, and he pays homage at a grave, an impressive large and understated flat stone block bearing the name “Beckett.” Even though the husband’s academic specialty is philosophy, Beckett is a Nobel prizewinner in Literature who sets the tone, presumably for this film’s catalog of human suffering and ills, where the participants, like Sisyphus, keep carrying on. The mixture of boredom, disaffection, humor, and comedy is captured in a number of iconic near-stills, like the one of the couple, as in a Lautrec painting, seated at a restaurant table side by side facing the camera, she with a man’s hat, each looking a bit inebriated, a bit lost, a bit isolated.
    There are some great dialogue exchanges, some comic sequences, and a great sense of ambiguity and, perhaps, love. One memorable exchange: “You make my blood boil like nobody else!” “Sign of a deep connection.”

A key set of climaxes in the film comes as the Burrows respond to an impromptu invitation from Morgan, a former Cambridge classmate of the husband (played by Jeff Goldblum as a successful American writer and public intellectual at his insouciant, self-involved, slightly silly, best), who apparently has no financial problems, but lives in an elegant Parisian home with his now-pregnant second wife. Morgan seems the center of a literary-philosophical salon, and his party is attended by successful thinkers in a variety of fields, in contrast to the Burrows. But at the party Nick and Meg retreat into their own separate, isolated states, wandering apart and apparently both lonely and depressed after their painful series of revelations to each other during the weekend.
    Meg is at first alone on a balcony staring forlornly into the beautiful Paris skyline, though she is soon joined by a younger man who shows some romantic interest and invites her to a drink at a bar around the corner.
    Nick wanders around the large house, as his wife had earlier wandered in the restaurant basement, and finds his way to the room of Morgan’s alienated teenage son. Professor and adolescent, like lover and wife, find something in common in their mutual alienations and satisfactions – and this is one of the film’s more remarkable scenes. Nick admits he, unlike the French, is both incapable of and disinterested in adultery. His revelations are accompanied on his earphones and the soundtrack by a voice-over of Bob Dylan’s “How does it feel to be on your own?”
    The dinner at the center of the party issues in four remarkable speeches, each of which plays off the others: they are given by Morgan and wife and then by Nick and Meg. The pregnant wife pays tribute to her husband, who then pays tribute to his friend and former colleague Nick. Nick, however, offers a truthful and depressing self-analysis, saying he is bankrupt, has been fired, and his wife has been asked to meet a younger man and she should.
    Finally, in a comic sequence, the couple are barred from their room because the husband has trashed one elegant wall with clippings and pin-ups and because their credit card is maxed out and they can’t afford the bill. The room clerk reminds them that he holds their passports locked in his safe, but essentially offers no resolution. So, as in the earlier financial crisis, they escape. Their only hope is Morgan, who meets them at a bar and offers to let them stay at his house until he sorts this out.
    As the film ends they escape their mutual troubles by dancing in line to a retro tune, spontaneous, happy, and a bit beyond the borders of the assured or probable – and in echo of Godard’s much earlier film Bande À Part [1964].

There is a kind of liberation in despair, honesty, and breaking – mildly – the law. There is also joy. Whether they will divorce or acknowledge their mutual affection and dependence, we don’t know; whether Morgan will tire of his adulation up close we can’t say; how they will retrieve their passports and emerge unscathed is open to question.
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Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Price

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