Author Topic: NYT Critics Pick: 'Weekend' A Morning After That Turns Into a Dance of Discovery  (Read 6725 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/movies/weekend-directed-by-andrew-haigh-review.html


Weekend (2011)
NYT Critics' Pick
A Morning After That Turns
Into a Dance of Discovery

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: September 22, 2011



Tom Cullen, left, as Russell, and Chris New as Glen, in "Week- end," a British film written and
directed by Andrew Haigh.



The collapse of sexual taboos has caused some trouble for love, or at least for love stories. That sex often precedes emotional intimacy — or proceeds without it — is a fact of life that movies, with their deep and longstanding investment in romance, especially have a hard time dealing with. Contemporary sexual mores tend to be explored either with grim, punitive realism (as in Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” soon to play at the New York Film Festival) or with cute and careful wishful thinking.

Comedies like “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits” strain to adapt the ethics of the modern bedroom to tidy and traditional marriage plots (though not always with benefit of clergy). What starts as zipless lust winds up in a longing for commitment. The desires of the flesh rarely spare the heart.

You can’t really fault Hollywood, an empire built on fantasies of heterosexual happiness, for simplifying such complex matters. But there is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat.

“Weekend,” Andrew Haigh’s astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film. In its matter-of-fact, tightly focused observation of two young men who find their one-night stand growing into something more serious, the movie ranges over vast, often neglected regions of 21st-century life. It is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era, and also about the enduring mystery of sexual attraction and its consequences.

Shot in a little more than two weeks and taking place over a little more than two days, “Weekend” is also, even primarily, about the leisure-time activities of ordinary British young people, who go to clubs and children’s birthday parties, settle in to marriage or seek out casual sex, and unwind after work with beer, hashish and takeout curries.

Mr. Haigh films these activities in the ground-level, hand-held style that has become the international signature of movies by and about restless youth. The audience does not hear music unless the people on screen hear it too, and the overall look and sound display a studious lack of polish. The dialogue feels improvised; the editing is a mix of abrupt cuts and extended takes; and the themes emerge slowly, in keeping with the natural diffidence of the characters.

Or one of them, anyway. Russell (Tom Cullen), who works as a lifeguard at a public pool, lives in a way that disproves any easy, either-or distinction between being in or out of the closet. In the early scenes, which show him hanging out with a mostly straight, mostly paired-off group of friends (including his best pal from childhood), he seems comfortable with himself, but also circumspect. Later, at a gay club, his cruising has a similarly low-key, slightly abashed aspect.

The next morning he wakes up with Glen (Chris New), who is more outspoken and outgoing, full of jokes, opinions and ideas that both unsettle and intrigue his new acquaintance. As they sip coffee in bed, Glen pulls out a tape recorder and interviews Russell about the previous night’s encounter, which the audience has not seen.

The recitation of physical acts creates both immediacy and distance — it can be more embarrassing to talk about some things than to do them — which is part of Glen’s intention. He explains to Russell that the taped conversation is part of an art project intended to explore the gap that opens up, when sex comes into play, between who someone really is and who he wants to be.

The differences between Glen and Russell form the dramatic backbone of “Weekend.” It is not just that they disagree about gay marriage, or that Glen is more politically assertive than Russell, who dislikes drawing attention to himself and resists linking his sexuality to a public cause. Their arguments — affectionate but intense — reflect contrasting personalities, and the friction between them is what makes them, potentially, such an interesting couple. Each one, without quite saying so, is grappling with basic questions about love and identity. What can I mean to another person? Whom do I want to be with? Who do I want to be?

A less brave, less honest movie would hasten to provide answers, assuming that the lovers require promises and that the audience needs reassurance. But “Weekend,” which is about the risks and pleasures of opening up emotionally in the presence of another, remains true to the unsettled, open-ended nature of the experience it documents. And for exactly this reason — because Mr. Haigh avoids the easy payoff of either a happy or a tragic ending — it is one of the most satisfying love stories you are likely to see on screen this year.



WEEKEND

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written, directed and edited by Andrew Haigh; director of photography, Ula Pontikos; music by James Edward Barker; production design by Sarah Finlay; produced by Tristan Goligher; released by Sundance Selects. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Tom Cullen (Russell), Chris New (Glen), Jonathan Race (Jamie), Laura Freeman (Jill), Jonathan Wright (Johnny) and Loretto Murray (Cathy).
« Last Edit: September 26, 2011, 08:37:20 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline southendmd

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Very good film, John.  I saw it at the Ptown film festival in June and it was a stand-out. 

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Very good film, John.  I saw it at the Ptown film festival in June and it was a stand-out. 



Thanks for the recommendation, Paul--I better go because, although--


You can't really fault Hollywood, an empire built on fantasies of heterosexual happiness--


I think I simply must!


 ;D

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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I have never seen the word diffidence before, I am going to have to start using that one.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Yeah I am diffidencely adding it to my queue.  :laugh:
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Monika

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This looks pretty interesting! Gonna see if I can get a hold of it.

Offline Monika

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Yeah I am diffidencely adding it to my queue.  :laugh:
Oh, come on, don´t be diffident!



(you can bet your ass I googled)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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I have never seen the word diffidence before, I am going to have to start using that one.


Yeah I am diffidencelytly adding it to my queue.  :laugh:



This looks pretty interesting! Gonna see if I can get a hold of it.



Don't, Monika, you don't want it. I'm the Reserved Diffidence Queen, as well as being Circumspect Reticence Man--I know, it's embroidered on my cape--and it's awful.

 :-X :-\ ::)

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/10/weekend_reviewed_andrew_haigh_s_amazingly_good_gay_romantic_come.html




Perfect Weekend
If you’ve ever met someone who changed
your life in the space of days, you’ll relate
to something in this movie.


By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Oct. 7, 2011, at 10:54 AM ET



Just when you start to despair for the future of a movie genre, along comes a specimen to prove it can still be found in the wild. Andrew Haigh’s remarkable Weekend  (IFC Films) unassumingly, almost offhandedly, demonstrates the continuing existence of the romantic comedy, if a comedy can be defined as a story in which, by whatever amusingly circuitous route, love eventually wins out. This miniaturist romance takes place over the course of one weekend. The couple in question is gay, but the film never plays like an earnest brief on behalf of gay equality: See, we can fall in love too! Haigh is both honest and specific in his portrait of a particular milieu (the gay male culture of Nottingham, England), but Weekend’s appeal transcends orientation. If you’ve ever met someone who changed your life in the space of days, you’ll relate to something in this movie.

That’s assuming you can roll with Weekend’s rambling, discursive structure and hyper-naturalistic, occasionally indecipherable dialogue. In its apparently casual construction and focus on the lives of young people in flux, Weekend sometimes resembles the work of filmmakers like Lynne Shelton or Andrew Bujalski—an emerging style that’s often given a name I abjured last year for its imprecision and implied derision. (I swore never to use the word again in these pages, but it rhymes with “bumblesnore.”) It seems to me this approach to making movies is now established enough to merit a different name, and more sustained critical attention. Haigh shoots on digital video in an unobtrusive vérité style, and his actors’ overlapping interchanges sound so real you think they must be improvised. But they can’t be—the conversational beats are too precisely timed, with each change of subject taking the couple to a different, more intimate, and riskier place. (Haigh, who makes his living as a film editor, also wrote the script and edited.)

Russell (Tom Cullen, in a breakout debut performance) works as a lifeguard at a city pool. He’s a loner, and something of a stoner (one of the first things we see him do in his carefully appointed bachelor flat is wake and bake.) One night he hits a club, picks up a cute guy named Glen (Chris New), and takes him home for a one-night stand. In the morning, Glen asks if he can get Russell on tape narrating their night together for an art project he’s working on. The ensuing frank conversation exposes the differences between the two men: the proudly out Glen is boundary-pushing and playfully raunchy, while Russell is bashful and a bit prudish, still closeted to his co-workers and some of his family. Glen presses Russell to finish the job of coming out, and shruggingly recounts his own conversation with his parents at age 16: “I told ‘em, nature or nurture, it’s your fault. Get over it.”
 
There’s an immediate spark between these two wildly dissimilar men, but as Glen tells Russell the morning after their tryst, “I don’t do boyfriends.” Later, he’ll add a corollary that illuminates, to us if not to himself, the reason why: “I don’t do goodbyes.” But in the next 48 hours, Russell and Glen will find themselves doing a fair bit of both. As it turns out, Glen, a gallery employee, is about to leave for a two-year art course in America. (The class difference between the two men is subtly but sharply etched, with middle-class Glen just a bit more educated and upwardly mobile than the less privileged Russell.)

With Glen’s time in England about to run out, there’s no point in the pair getting any closer than they already have—but by the same logic, there’s no reason not to get close. They compress a whole love affair into a weekend, riding bumper cars and eating cotton candy at a carnival, then staying up all night doing cocaine and telling their life stories. They debate gay marriage: Russell finds it a defiant public expression of love, while Glen argues it’s a conformist capitulation to straight domestic mores. (It’s refreshing to hear someone in a movie give voice to this unorthodox but not uncommon opinion, one also expressed by Rachel Maddow in a recent interview.) Russell and Glen fight and make up, have epically hot (and mildly graphic) sex, say their farewells and then pop back to make one last point. Their inability to separate is almost comical, until suddenly, as Glen’s train to the airport is about to leave the station, it becomes unexpectedly painful and real.
 
There aren’t many films about relationships, gay or straight, that are this attentive to the details of modern courtship. I loved the moment when Glen and Russell, saying goodbye after their first night together, traded cell phones and awkwardly typed in their own numbers, neither seeming quite sure he wanted a second date. Andrew Haigh’s accomplishment is modest but significant: He’s made a sharply observed love story that’s funny without punch lines and romantic without sap. I won’t give away whether Russell and Glen get their happy ending, except to say that in its poignant final scenes Weekend offers a joyfully expanded vision of what romantic fulfillment can be.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline chowhound

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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/10/weekend_reviewed_andrew_haigh_s_amazingly_good_gay_romantic_come.html




Perfect Weekend
If you’ve ever met someone who changed
your life in the space of days, you’ll relate
to something in this movie.


By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Oct. 7, 2011, at 10:54 AM ET



Just when you start to despair for the future of a movie genre, along comes a specimen to prove it can still be found in the wild. Andrew Haigh’s remarkable Weekend  (IFC Films) unassumingly, almost offhandedly, demonstrates the continuing existence of the romantic comedy, if a comedy can be defined as a story in which, by whatever amusingly circuitous route, love eventually wins out. This miniaturist romance takes place over the course of one weekend. The couple in question is gay, but the film never plays like an earnest brief on behalf of gay equality: See, we can fall in love too! Haigh is both honest and specific in his portrait of a particular milieu (the gay male culture of Nottingham, England), but Weekend’s appeal transcends orientation. If you’ve ever met someone who changed your life in the space of days, you’ll relate to something in this movie.

That’s assuming you can roll with Weekend’s rambling, discursive structure and hyper-naturalistic, occasionally indecipherable dialogue. In its apparently casual construction and focus on the lives of young people in flux, Weekend sometimes resembles the work of filmmakers like Lynne Shelton or Andrew Bujalski—an emerging style that’s often given a name I abjured last year for its imprecision and implied derision. (I swore never to use the word again in these pages, but it rhymes with “bumblesnore.”) It seems to me this approach to making movies is now established enough to merit a different name, and more sustained critical attention. Haigh shoots on digital video in an unobtrusive vérité style, and his actors’ overlapping interchanges sound so real you think they must be improvised. But they can’t be—the conversational beats are too precisely timed, with each change of subject taking the couple to a different, more intimate, and riskier place. (Haigh, who makes his living as a film editor, also wrote the script and edited.)

Russell (Tom Cullen, in a breakout debut performance) works as a lifeguard at a city pool. He’s a loner, and something of a stoner (one of the first things we see him do in his carefully appointed bachelor flat is wake and bake.) One night he hits a club, picks up a cute guy named Glen (Chris New), and takes him home for a one-night stand. In the morning, Glen asks if he can get Russell on tape narrating their night together for an art project he’s working on. The ensuing frank conversation exposes the differences between the two men: the proudly out Glen is boundary-pushing and playfully raunchy, while Russell is bashful and a bit prudish, still closeted to his co-workers and some of his family. Glen presses Russell to finish the job of coming out, and shruggingly recounts his own conversation with his parents at age 16: “I told ‘em, nature or nurture, it’s your fault. Get over it.”
 
There’s an immediate spark between these two wildly dissimilar men, but as Glen tells Russell the morning after their tryst, “I don’t do boyfriends.” Later, he’ll add a corollary that illuminates, to us if not to himself, the reason why: “I don’t do goodbyes.” But in the next 48 hours, Russell and Glen will find themselves doing a fair bit of both. As it turns out, Glen, a gallery employee, is about to leave for a two-year art course in America. (The class difference between the two men is subtly but sharply etched, with middle-class Glen just a bit more educated and upwardly mobile than the less privileged Russell.)

With Glen’s time in England about to run out, there’s no point in the pair getting any closer than they already have—but by the same logic, there’s no reason not to get close. They compress a whole love affair into a weekend, riding bumper cars and eating cotton candy at a carnival, then staying up all night doing cocaine and telling their life stories. They debate gay marriage: Russell finds it a defiant public expression of love, while Glen argues it’s a conformist capitulation to straight domestic mores. (It’s refreshing to hear someone in a movie give voice to this unorthodox but not uncommon opinion, one also expressed by Rachel Maddow in a recent interview.) Russell and Glen fight and make up, have epically hot (and mildly graphic) sex, say their farewells and then pop back to make one last point. Their inability to separate is almost comical, until suddenly, as Glen’s train to the airport is about to leave the station, it becomes unexpectedly painful and real.
 
There aren’t many films about relationships, gay or straight, that are this attentive to the details of modern courtship. I loved the moment when Glen and Russell, saying goodbye after their first night together, traded cell phones and awkwardly typed in their own numbers, neither seeming quite sure he wanted a second date. Andrew Haigh’s accomplishment is modest but significant: He’s made a sharply observed love story that’s funny without punch lines and romantic without sap. I won’t give away whether Russell and Glen get their happy ending, except to say that in its poignant final scenes Weekend offers a joyfully expanded vision of what romantic fulfillment can be.

Aloysius, do you know where this movie might be available? For instance, has it been released yet on DVD? It certainly sounds interesting and I'd love to see it but there's been no sign that it's about to be released commercially - at least here in Toronto.