It should in theory be possible to make a movie about a couple who make a sentimental journey to Paris to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary, only to discover over 48 unforgettable hours that they are entirely content with each other. That isn't what happens in Le Week-End, written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell. Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent play Meg and Nick, two married almost-retirees who, in the autumn of their lives, have decided to award themselves a Eurostar trip to the world's most romantic city. As the action continues, the audience is likely to have the same relationship with the film as the main characters have with each other: sometimes exasperated, sometimes bored, often affectionate. It's funny in a hangdog way: lugubrious and downbeat, prickly and bloody-minded, contrived in its crises, and demonstrating the kind of unsentimentality that is actually a bit sentimental. It all creates the kind of gentle melancholy comedy after which you leave the cinema not sure quite how depressed you are supposed to be feeling.
The Paris trip has thrown it all into stark relief. As they glance at each other in their unfamiliar hotel room, seeing each other as if for the first time, it is as if fate has fixed them up on a blind date, kept them blind for three decades and then finally whipped off the blindfold to let each see the grumpy, sagging oldster they're stuck with. At one stage, Meg is astonished at some misjudged suggestion of Nick's: "Don't you know me at all?"
This sudden disorientation or estrangement has a weirdly erotic side effect – which also has something to do with being in a sleek hotel room. Sex could well be on the agenda. And yet this subject, pleasurable though it is, raises the issue of Nick's toxic jealousy, itself a byproduct of his queasy self-doubt.
Meg teaches in a secondary school and Nick is a philosophy lecturer at a new university: his academic position, it turns out, is rather precarious, owing to a faculty row – and here Kureishi may be influenced by the fictions of JM Coetzee and Philip Roth, although the dispute is not dwelt upon. As for Meg, her position is different, but the same miasma of discontent is overhead. Over the years, Nick has managed to suppress his disappointment with life, but his underachievement can't be ignored when the couple run into Morgan, amiably played by Jeff Goldblum: a media-star academic who was Nick's university contemporary and who once looked up to him as the greater mind: a charismatic hipster who loved Godard.
Morgan roguishly flirts with Meg and invites the couple to the ritzy launch party for his latest shallow work of pop philosophy, an event that lights the blue touchpaper under the rocket of their marital despair. Could it be that what this weekend has revealed to the couple is how very much they basically dislike each other? And if that is the case, do they have the courage to act on this knowledge?
Part of the couple's agony is that they are empty-nesters. They did not fully realise that they may face a long future post-children and post-work: things which had for so long been their reason for living. It is Nick especially who is afraid of being alone, but at the same time afraid of being alone with his wife: the reason, perhaps, why he had allowed their deadbeat son to live with them in the family home for so long. This is a return to a favourite topic of Kureishi's – intimacy – and for me the movie is a distant reminder of his 2001 film Intimacy, directed by the late Patrice Chéreau.
But along with this fear is a kind of jittery, defiant freedom and fun, a feeling that going for broke is now a real lifestyle option, maybe the only option. Duncan and Broadbent give warm and intelligent performances. In their faces you can see the ghosts of the kids Meg and Nick once were: stroppy, horny and happy.
