Roger Michell’s LE WEEK-END Opens in St. Louis March 28

If you have a proclivity for the smaller, indie films, then you won’t want to miss LE WEEK-END.  This charming film opens at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema in St. Louis this Friday, March 28th.

Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent (IRIS, TOPSY-TURVY, ANOTHER YEAR) and Lindsay Duncan (ABOUT TIME, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, MANSFIELD PARK) give exquisite performances as Nick and Meg, a long-married British couple revisiting Paris for the first time since their honeymoon in an attempt to rekindle their relationship.

During a two-day escapade, diffident, wistful Nick and demanding, take-charge Meg careen from harmony to disharmony to resignation and back again as they take stock of half a lifetime of deep tenderness – and even deeper regret. A surprise invitation from Nick’s old friend Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), an amusingly boorish American academic with a fancy Parisian address, soon leads them to an unexpectedly hopeful vision of what their love and marriage might still become.

LE WEEK-END marks the third feature collaboration between Director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (twitter: @Hanifkureishi). The idea for the project started when they were finishing 2006’s Oscar-nominated VENUS. “We thought it would be fun to do the idea of a couple in Paris together,” says Michell. “Seeing what happens between a couple when the kids start to leave home” was central to the original idea for the film.

Michell and Kureishi then embarked on what seemed the most sensible method of research: to visit Paris together as a sort of grumpy couple. “All the things you see Jim and Lindsay do in this film, we did!” jokes Michell.

Watch the trailer for the film that Ann Hornaday (The Washington Post) calls “Emotionally charged and very funny.”

Every so often, films will turn their attention to the romantic lives of older people, but often in an “isn’t that charming” manner that borders on condescension. Bracing, and full of passion, LE WEEK-END’s characters shed the cozy comfort of retiree romantic comedy for an altogether more charged love story.

Meg and Nick have been together forever. For their thirtieth wedding anniversary, they’ve chosen to return to Paris, where they honeymooned. It’s not long before the city of light begins reflecting the couple’s conflicts right back at them.

Rejecting their first, depressingly beige, hotel for an impossibly expensive choice, Meg then begins rejecting her husband. “Can I touch you?” he asks, tentatively. “What for?” she snaps. Although they would never stoop to acting them out physically, this relationship has emotional contours the Marquis de Sade could embrace.

When Meg and Nick run into their insufferably successful old friend, played with pure delight by Jeff Goldblum, their squabbles rise to a register that’s both emotionally rich and very funny.

By turns sharply comic and deadly serious, LE WEEK-END is full of surprises. The dialogue has both the heart and the crackle of Richard Linklater’s BEFORE… series, delving deep into the tensions that shape this couple’s relationship while holding nothing back.

Director Roger Michell has shown us the pleasures of complicated romance before, but never has his filmmaking felt freer.

LE WEEK-END will have wide appeal for both underserved older audiences and a wider movie-going public. The theme of “Love conquers all” underlies all that happens on Nick and Meg’s Parisian weekend sojourn.

From the brittle scenes at their hotel, to Goldblum’s delicious intervention, LE WEEK-END strikes one surprising grace note after another in its deeply honest portrayal of the perils – and the glorious possibilities – of our romantic lives.