Le Week-End (2014)

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Oh my goodness. We wanted to give up on this movie the whole way through. It was slow and we had a hard time connecting enough with the characters to want to watch them. We understood their angst, but they weren't likable enough to want to devote 1h30m of our lives to watching. The language was below par and the screenplay was one annoying thing after another. We made the mistake of watching it on Netflix instead of DVD. On DVD we could have watched on fast-forward. BUT.. We really like these actors and we really liked the beautiful camera shots of Paris and throwing a Tom Petty song in there helped too, so we stuck with it. The story basically shows a double nervous breakdown and the last few minutes of the film were finally fun and lovely. We'd like to see what happens next in the story, as long as that story moves along a bit quicker and the language is more appealing.

My good spouse of many years said at the end, "If we ever go to Paris, let's watch a different movie about it first." What a disappointment. Every line of sarcastic, cynical, needy character-non-development went nowhere. Watching two good actors work so hard from start to finish to portray shallow one-dimensional people clawing at each other for validation and appreciation -- consistently either denied or bestowed and later betrayed -- was soul-numbing. We viewers learned that every possible opening for relational connection -- i.e., every chance that we might care about these narcissistic people -- would become just another set-up for recurrent emotional abandonment."This was written by a guy." I forget which one of us spoke the obvious out loud after the first ten minutes.I found the most interesting characters in the film were the clever hotel security guys, who could think ahead enough to block the escape of these lying, cheating, empty, 60-something preschoolers. I wished the movie would have followed one of the security guys home and given us a story about a thinking human being with a learning curve.A positive? Some of the views of Paris were enjoyable.But for the rest of it, a horror-movie Ugh.

Nick and Meg are a British couple celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary with a weekend getaway in Paris. As they travel around the city, they revisit the highs and lows of their relationship, fight about their faults, and continue to run out of restaurants without paying the bill. They meet up with an old colleague of Nick's and attend a dinner party at his house, leading to some painful truths being spoken aloud......Imagine films like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, or Up The Junction, and take the characters from those films, forward it thirty years, and you have Nick and Meg. Its a kitchen sink drama, but in the middle class, and this is the films point of interest.Broadbent and Duncan are effortless as the twenty something's trapped in their ageing bodies, and sometimes it's really heart wrenching when Meg is being Abhorrent toward Nick and their relationship.But the relationship is just so real. Its as if you are watching an actual married couple on screen, and just when you think things are looking up for the couple, we have Jeff Goldblum appearing as an old colleague of Nicks, sparking something up again.Its a wonderful little film, with some great performances, and the scene at the dinner table is both heart warming, and crushing.

This movie is like an unofficial 5th entry to the "Before..."-series (which I truly adore) by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. However, I really hope that the real one, if we get it around 2030 will be better quality-wise. "Le Week-End" could not convince me. We have a couple, who on their 30th wedding anniversary, travel to Paris. I rarely ever had the feeling that they were truly in love with each other. Okay, you could bring up as an argument that after 30 years things aren't that emotional anymore and just return to normal, but sometimes their actions looked downright as if they really only wanted to hurt each other. Comparing this to another performance from 2013, June Squibb in Nebraska (a truly great film by the way), she was certainly rough, but you could always feel that she still loved her man. And that is totally missing here. They seem as if, in real life, they would have been divorced long ago.Jeff Goldblum, who I am usually a great fan of, could not really convince me here either. He has the biggest supporting role. People who know him know that he almost always walks the fine line between great authenticity and almost too extreme behavior. Sadly, here he occasionally crosses it. Nonetheless he is fun to watch as always and is responsible for some of the highlights of the film. Still it was difficult to decide if he was actually a likable character. The one person that definitely was not likable here is Lindsey Duncan's character, who not only lacks subtlety, but behaves really horribly in some situations, such as when her husband falls and she tells him to be a man or when she tells her husband of 30 years that she is gonna go out with a younger man that night.The husband is a bit of a likable victim from start to finish. We find out about his career or nonexistence thereof, his marriage struggles, his health concerns and it all culminates in a great monologue at the full table near the end with people all around him. The whole party is a bit dull though and could have been made much more interesting with all the characters who were the guests there just working as forgettable background actors. Most of the dialogs were written in a convincing way, but there were several scenes which had no real purpose at all, occasionally didn't even fit the characters such as the randomly included pot smoking scene. The final silent walk down the stairs was probably intended to be powerful by the makers, but it left no impression on me at all. It rather felt contradictory to all the hullabaloo that happened minutes before.This film tries to be loud and hip on so many occasions, instead of going for quiet subtlety, which really could have made this work. The frequent sex references (talking about it, moaning...) were mostly more embarrassing than funny and felt also included randomly without any real purpose, just in order to get some cheap laughs.Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi reunited here seven years after making Venus (starring the recently deceased Peter O'Toole), but judging from the outcome and the quality of "Le Week-End" all the sparkle in their collaborations seems gone. Not recommended.