Director: Roger Michell
Talent: Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Goldblum
Release Date: 11th October 2013
This bittersweet Parisian comedy about a relationship in crisis, from the director of Notting Hill, contains more misery than its breezy form can sustain, matching the most middle-brow of British, fish-out-of-water tourist humour with frank expressions of its two principal players’ dissatisfaction and existential grief, ostensibly at the end of their long marriage together. Broadbent and Duncan are perfectly at home playing their respective characters, which they do with charm and subtlety, while Jeff Goldblum joyfully chews the scenery as an old friend and blowhard intellectual with all the nuance of a love rival in a Woody Allen film. Unfortunately, Le Week-end fails entirely in balancing its well-wrought tragedy with any decent laughs, as its ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ spirit fails to overcome the fundamental sadness at the film’s heart, quite literally dancing around the issue in a final scene reminiscent of nothing so much as the banal misery of existing.
