Tropic sprockets
Le Week-End keeps you guessing
Le Week-End “Le Week-End” is the long awaited film by Roger Michell (Venus) and it also produces another well done collaboration with Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Launderette).
This twisty tale of sweet lemon and bitters stars Jim Broadbent as a deflated professor and the underrated Lindsay Duncan as his restless wife who is also a teacher. Nick (Broadbent) has the idea to breathe life into his enervated marriage by taking Meg (Duncan) to Paris for the weekend. Needless to say, they are snarling within seconds. Nick loses his passports (or thinks he does) and Meg is at his throat.
When they get to a so called quaint inn, the room is cramped and institution-beige with little ventilation. This doesn’t help matters. Meg takes off and Nick is left holding the bag, trying to placate the concierge. He manages to track Meg down who tries to book a five star suite. There are no rooms. With a bit of patience, the two warriors secure a suite, a supposed favorite of Tony Blair.
In the midst of offering an olive branch and a white flag, Nick and Meg get into it again, revisiting old hurts and passive-aggressive jabs in the mode of an Albee play. During one scene, Meg angrily knocks Nick in the chest and he falls on his knee, hitting the cobblestones.
As if a switch is pulled, Meg is transformed into the caring spouse and then an hour later at a bistro, they are at it again. Nick becomes a perspiring flowerpot under Meg’s biting attacks. It is not that Nick and Meg do not love one another, they clearly do. However this is one case where love may have run its course and neither person is strong enough to leave the other.
The emotional suspense is in watching just how far they will go. Along the way, they get tipsy and make up a bit, meeting an old colleague along the way: the pandering, snaky, yet also disinterested and elaborately insincere Morgan (well played by the ultimate actor of Odd, Jeff Goldblum). Morgan invites them to a party, a soirée that is in actuality an event to stroke his ego. Every person at the party resembles Morgan in pomposity. Morgan pays a self conscious tribute to Nick at the dinner party, unaware that Meg had (just hours before) given Nick the ax.
The spark of this film is that it manages to keep you guessing, having a great looseness in its narration, combined with some fine detail. Jim Broadbent is excellent as he unwinds to near catatonia, in singing Bob Dylan on his iPod, and Lindsay Duncan gives a rich and highly charged role as a vexed, frustrated and restless woman. This is not “The Out-of-Towners” or a “Midnight in Paris”, nor should it be. This is a stay shared with two people in an unfamiliar land who know each other too well.
Although the cinematography that puts Paris in lights is first rate, the emphasis is on the hapless rancor of a couple with all their bumps and bruises rather than stunning locations. There is some telling symbolism too, as the interiors are often shaded with browns and grays. Cafés and rooms are either cluttered or desolate while hotel rooms are rife with a distemper of anxiety. Far from creating a wild melodrama, every frame is authentic and deliberately intentioned with meaning. “Le Week-End” is a thoughtful sojourn that highlights a couple in portraiture: one man and one woman who yearn desperately to find the jasmine threads of Bohemianism that may or may not be lost. Each mate is spent to near exhaustion by the other, but their shared fatigue and familiarity— newly fused in a single nostalgic dance— make a comforting elixir.
On My Way Francophiles rejoice! We have not seen the last of the iconic Catherine Deneuve who stars in “On My Way”, a heartfelt and well acted comedy drama by director Emmanuelle Bercot.
Deneuve, who has played everything under the sun, from a tortured manicurist to an icy vampire, and has worked with the great surrealist Luis Bunuel in “Belle de Jour,” gives another fine outing as a hassled restauranteur. While this might seem like a flaccid scenario for a Deneuve film, attendre! The star gives it a charge of magical realism as she comes upon one eccentric kook after another. Bettie is a former beauty queen and anxious chef who lives with her mom (Claude Gensac).
When the oppressed, yet still sultry Bettie gets the news that her married lover has flown the coop, Bettie goes bonkers and takes off at full tilt in her Mercedes. This scene with its swirling camera might bring to mind Deneuve’s harried histrionics in “Repulsion”, but here her heart is in the right place, free from gore.
Bettie has a new insurmountable craving for cigarettes so she takes refuge in the home of an old man to bum a smoke. He tells her of his haunted past. Then Bettie gets a unexpected call from her absent daughter (the French singer Camille) who demands that she watch her son Charly (Nemo Schiffman).
In her travels, she is plagued by the weather and car trouble and has picaresque experiences with various ne’er do wells. Chief among them is the cloying and lazy Marco (Paul Hamy); Bettie loses her wherewithal and lands in bed with the slumberous Marco. She wakes with a start as the sun closes in upon her—an all seeing eye.
Just when Bettie exits from the wet octopus arms of Marco, she is hit by torrential rain and takes cover in a furniture store, guarded by a man who can’t make any sense of this nervous woman. Interspersed with these scenes are invasive and insidious reminders of Bettie’s (or Deneuve’s) celebrity past as a beauty queen and femme fatale.
These touches give the film its most meaningful adhesion, putting Deneuve in fine company with Gloria’s Paulina Garcia and Toni Servillo of “The Great Beauty”. Bettie finally gets to the grandson and Nemo Schiffman does solidly, giving ample doses of savage brattiness, irreverence and emotion. Even as Deneuve babysits, our eyes are riveted by her legacy.
Deneuve commands the screen. And admirers of her psychological roles will be well pleased by a fainting spell as an infinite number of flashbulbs assault Bettie like a swarm of biting silverfish. But all is not a parade of day terrors with “the ladies who lunch”. We also see a smoldering Bettie who practically gobbles on the neck of a sour grandfather (Gerard Garouste) When we see a manic Muriel, ranting and raving, events seem a shade a la von Trier, especially with the release of some rabbits escaping a sudden angry fire.
All is fittingly squelched with the conventional arrival of dinner and wine. And although it might be tempting to say ‘ho hum’, the tension in Bettie remains. “On My Way” is an entertaining and satisfying road film, due in no small part to Catherine Deneuve’s allure.
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