Breakfast in a cafe: Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent)
Moment of release (also from Le Weekend, scripted Hanif Kureishi, directed Roger Michell)
Dear friends and readers,
I hurried out today around 4:30 in the afternoon, to catch my Uber cab to take me to the one theater in my 3 state area (10 minutes away) still playing Le Weekend because I thought I’d like it and I had read reviews whose condemnation was (I could now see) based on the 3 act goal-, and plot-oriented screenplay structure, said to be the only one worth doing (with its obstacles, pinch points, and resolution). I wanted to confirm to myself this movie was being wrongly damned because it used what Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush in their book, Alternative Scriptwriting call “alternative” modes.
Well I did like it very much, it certainly does avail itself of “alternative modes” (as did two more of the four films I’ve seen recently: The Lunchbox, Gloria), and I recommend not missing it as an intelligent and absorbing depiction of a long-married English couple’s attempt to experience some enjoyment and perhaps patch up their relationship by a weekend in Paris they can ill afford. Each feels he and she has failed in life: Nick has just been fired from, and Meg is on the edge of retiring, from teaching. During the time of the movie we see their painful (and sometimes satisfying) sexual acting out: she does refuse him sex, will not submit and at one point he gets down like a dog in front of her (perhaps this is why it’s dissed); at the same time he’s the (ex-)university professor (albeit Birmingham) and she only a schoolteacher and clings to him; Morgan is his friend, not hers. We hear their sudden passionate self-revealing subtext outbursts, witness moments of release and fun too and listen to them talk and talk, not always coherently.
They encounter Moran (Jeff Goldblum), a successful American colleague of Nick’s, go a party where they meet his prestigious Parisian connections in publishing and beautiful young pregnant French wife (he’s on his second family), and empathetic (to Nick) seemingly isolated teenage NYC son from another marriage.
It is part of the movie’s meaning that Lindsay Duncan does carry off the role of an aging still beautiful woman (who may long for an affair but has not had one) and Jim Broadbent an aging still virile (if frequently frustrated and jealous) man. Its intended niche is probably the 50 to 70 set although some of what happens surely speaks home to any adult experiencing increasingly frustratingly counterproductive roles in worlds where inequalities are made more egregious by the insistent luxurious environments.
The lobby
In the hotel room
There is a sort of resolution: by the end they have confessed to one another how much they need and mean to one another, have told an exploitative son (who is in need of a place without rats for himself, wife and baby) no, he cannot come live with them again (upon which the son hangs up), gotten themselves so badly in debt for a gorgeous suite in a top Parisian hotel that their passports and luggage is being held. The friend comes to take them back to his flat, with the film dissolving into a three way dance to a juke box in yet another cafe.
Morgan at a dinner party he invited them to, just before he makes his speech on behalf of Nick’s life — and Nick makes a counter-one showing himself to be a financial and career failure
They do not (as most reviews online have suggested) end up burnt out completely — far from it. The friend, an ex-student pal of Nick’s speaks a speech which shows how meaningful much of Nick’s life as a teacher and scholar have been. Meg has at least held her own as a woman in daily control of herself, her body, her space. The aesthetic closure of the film (the final dancing) is much less important than the texture of the experiences (hotel rooms, clothes, food, their bodies) and thematic parallels and contrasts, the spoken words and gestures in the film’s story-line and character displays, the colors and lights, now garish, now washed out.
Paris at night and they remember hurts
Shots are oddly cut and juxtaposed, a hand-held camera is common; there are no crises until the very end (when their credit card is canceled), no ratcheting up at the end of “acts,” no pinch points or melodramatic reversals from which there is no return or even surprises.
Street walking
I decided to write about this movie because it defies the Syd Field prescription — as do many of my favorite films and I don’t just go to art films. I go to mainstream ones (like Woody Allen’s which often do not fit). I don’t think this movie’s premise, appercus, rich if bleak offering could be conveyed by the 3 act structure so insisted on as the only thing possible (except for the rare “art” film) in not only the widely-read work of Field but most books on screenplays which are knock-offs and variations on his schemata. And I regularly see many films which do not adhere to the three act structure trumpeted everywhere, whether character- or plot-driven.
How do these screenplay books get away with this falsification. I’m reading a more intelligent version of these just now: Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush’s Alternative Scriptwriting.
Cover for first edition
It’s simple: they do not discuss any films by women, any films made with the women in an audience in mind. All the movies they analyze at length are better versions of strong male-oriented hits Field analyzes (e.g., The Verdict where guess what the hero gets control over his life); in the rare instances they do have a film meant for women, it’s one which follows the masculine model (Thelma and Louise does). Another aspect of these choices: — no homosexual central roles in any of the chosen films for analysis. I know US films have a narrow view of heterosexual male sexuality and rarely make a homosexual person central — hardly have a GBLT person as a minor character — and it is reinforced in these formula books.
Dancyger and Rush made be said to try to offer an alternative to what is an intelligent version of Syd Field but not quite succeed. Several times now when they say here is an alternative structure, they go about to discover the Field model (action, goal oriented, finally upbeat) or when it’s not there they talk about what is substituted. I don’t think Ingmar Bergman in his (1955) marvelous magnificent Smiles of a Summer Night (which I watched the other night) was substituting features for a Fieldian model in an archetypcal mould.
I wish I could say I was amused by Dancyger and Rush’s single paragraph acknowledging both the conventional models they begin with are not the way “women know”. They cite a famous classic, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, agree it’s cyclical and goes against conventional goal-oriented conventions, but after briefly recommending a book on Women’s Ways of Knowing, they move on. They also have a brief chapter on the “multiple threaded long form TV serial scripts.” They do analyze how it differs: for example a “narrative voice” or tone and mood emerges by organizing the segments around unifying themes. They appear to find this form rich with more possibilities of intertextuality and intelligence than the three part Field structure. At the same time though they avoid all the really popular costume dramas and soap operas and instead found some popular male serial on commercial TV or looked briefly at Breaking Bad. There really appears to be no book on women’s screenplays and scripts where they differ radically from men’s. No book on the kind of screenplay used for Le Weekend.
I have about 4 books on technical filmic art matters by feminist film critics who are women; one of them Women and Film (ed Pam Cook) is quoted everywhere. My little library appears to comprise some of the central ones written! books by women which are in effect analyzing to expose the falseness of typical shibboleths and taboos (no voice over, no flashback as feminine or too intellectual): Kozloff’s Invisible Storytellers, and Turim on flashbacks and time in film, but neither identifies herself openly as feminist or about films by women (as do the books on content and women’s films like Jeanine Basinger’s How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-70). I now see they do go over films I watch and go well outside these action-adventure male films, but none of them go into screenplays, the very backbone of the film. I have a number of studies of costume drama and soap opera but again often not of the scripts or screenplays.
A lacuna. A perspective for the first part of my book (as my reader will instantly recalled its working title is A Place of Refuge: the Jane Austen film canon could be how Austen films go against these male conventions in many of their screenplasy – even though many of the Austen films are by men and several of those by women for popular cinema obey the male conventions, e.g., Juliette Towhidi’s Death comes to Pemberley out of P.D.James’s book has the restorative three act structure used for character development: the premise of the film is Elizabeth needs to prove herself mistress of Pemberley, gain everyone’s respect the way her housekeeper, Mrs Reynolds has, to somehow show Darcy that he did not make a mistake when he married her, and prove that to herself; only within this upbeat goal-oriented convention does a gothic cyclical structure emerge for the Wickham-Young-Bidwell back-story repeating the hanging of a boy in the previous generation; and a flowering out soap opera romance one for Georgiana Darcy, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and Henry Alveston triangular conflicts.
Each of the characters in the book and film of The Jane Austen Book Club corresponds to characters and themes in Austen’s book
Still of the 5 films I’ve chosen for this opening part, 4 are based on books by woman, 4 have women as script writers, 1 a woman director and producer, and I know three of them, Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, and Guy Andrews’s Lost in Austen rely on the alternative feminine (if one wants to give it a gender label), narrative voice and dialogue within a multiple thread plot-design. The middle part is a study of the 7 Sense and Sensibility films as a group and the third (a triptych!) what are the assumptions film-makers make about the reading experience audiences have had with an Austen novel and expect to have analogously in watching an Austen film. What makes many readers uncomfortable when they read Austen and what have the film-makers done to compensate, erase, replace. The perspective here at the last will be biographical, out of her letters and the one biopic film based on these, Miss Austen Regrets.
I have gathered a number of screenplays and DVDs to watch and study: a number by women, e.g., Laura Jones’s The Portrait of Lady, some by intelligent sensitive males, Pinter’s A Proust Screenplay, Graham Greene’s a Third Man, four of Ingmar Bergmann’s and four of Woodie Allen’s. But I find that nothing is a complete and useful as the annotated and footnoted scripts accompanied by richly-illustrated and photographed scenario books for Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey (and a combined book for Vanity Fair, directed by Mira Nair) and rejoice at the coming third book of scripts for the third season, due out next year just in time for the airing of the fifth season: shooting has already
begun.
Tom Branson (Allen Leech) and Sarah Bunting (Daisy Lewis) in the rain under an umbrella — making me remember Jo March and Prof Bauer’s kiss under his umbrella (Little Women)
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Thank you very much for the insightful film review of Le Weekend. I will try to see it. Tomorrow I plan on seeing Lunchbox. Enjoyed Grand Budapest Hotel immensely. Wes Anderson is undoubtedly a genius.
Elaine
I too enjoyed this post. At first, I thought, with some confusion, you were referencing Goddard’s Le Weekend from the 1960s. I had not heard of this movie and likely will not see it until it comes to Netflix or dvd, given where I live. I teach Kureishi’s My son, the fanatic, also made into a film which I haven’t seen. I am interested and curious that his stories, at least two, keep getting made into films.
And thank you in turn for these comments. They make me learn by dialoguing. I have in my house a book of Kureishi’s screenplays which (I regret to say) I’ve not read anything of as yet. I picked it up in a library book sale: titled London Kills Me, it includes My Beautiful Laundrette; Sammie and Rose Get Laid — made into great British TV films in the 1980s. Also four brief essays on them. His outlook is deeply humane.
And yet Rush & Dancyger continue the Syd Field tradition; it’s a form of imposition, propaganda: like Orwell said, say something loud and frequently enough and most will accept it as truth. Rush and Dancyger do say “mainstream” films are picking up alternative modes and art films some mainstream techniques. What I see is a masculinization of the alternative mode.
As for not having even opened this treasure (it’s an old book), I take too much on and don’t know what to do first — I have to carve out a real big space for working on my book, but the urge is ever to cut to the direct stuff. What I ought to do is spend a few weeks reading the screenplays I have in my house and when I can rent or see them (because I own a DVD) watching the movie.
I went to see Le Weekend on Tuesday and am sorry to say I didn’t like it all that much. I didn’t find the situation believable, i.e., I didn’t believe that a couple like that would behave so irresponsibly by running up a ridiculous hotel bill and not having more than one credit card. But I must say that I found Jim Broadbent’s performance compelling. The character he portrayed stayed with me for a long time. I thought he was thoroughly believable and most sympatico. There must be many people like him, especially in the world of teaching. Here is a Cambridge graduate, probably a star student, in philosophy, who ends up teaching in some third rate polytechnic in some god-for-saken city in the middle of England (Middlemarch?). By way of a thank you, he is pushed into early retirement for saying something sensible but perhaps rude to a black female student. A shot here at PC I take it. So he must face the fact that his life amounts to very little. It’s part of the disappearing middle class, I suppose, but we don’t really get a sense of that. Although there were some good moments in the film, but I thought of a British friend who died last year and thought his life was much more interesting, almost tragic, really: pushed by his mother to do well in school, suffering a nervous breakdown at King’s College so he never graduated, becoming a highly successful ad man, living the high life in Hong Kong, disappearing for a year or two in an alcoholic stupor, and then starting over again and finally losing it all, ending up selling antiques in the market and turning his million dollar London home into a warehouse. In the end his urge to self-destruct won out as he worked himself to death to support his damaged kids, one on the verge of becoming a neo-nazi. Strangely, the other, who was the so-called “lay about” finally got himself a job after his father passed away. I think as we get older we are in danger of letting our childhood complexes take over.
At least the film made an attempt to address real life issues, better than most of the drivel out there. I still haven’t seen Lunchbox, so I will try to get to it as it looks much more promising. I just bought a copy of the film Amazing Grace about the abolitionist William Wilberforce and plan on watching it this weekend. Anyone seen it? Yesterday I started teaching again, so I will be very busy for the next eight weeks. I enjoyed my first class – we read an excerpt from Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies.
Elaine
Sorry to hear you didn’t like the film all that much, Elaine. I had no one to compare Nick with. Probably all the tenured academics I’ve known have been at a distance so I don’t know the inside of their stories and I’ never known anyone personally who made huge sums as an enterpreneur and (as I’ve been told in such stories), then loses what he earned, then gains again. All the lives I’ve known closer (few and mostly on the Net, since coming here) have been quiet ones just like Nick’s. Utterly believable to me — from far I’ve seen lots of instances of this unrecognized kind of valuable life at the end of which the person is lucky not to be kicked and get his pension.
I do believe in their irresponsibility if you want to call it that. They are snatching what they can and hoping to escape before they are caught. They gave up their credit card numbers and should have thought. For myself I wouldn’t find such a weekend a good time at all: I dislike these luxury hotels intensely, all they are (stilted, like some over-produced movie set), what passes for food in most of them; we’d have stayed (me and Jim) in that first flat — or he’d have worked to find something modest we could be comfortable in. We did do that twice and stayed in Paris twice, once for nearly 2 weeks, once for a week. So I would have loved wandering about — and the film did not show them going to cultural things for real at all, but I’m used to that. Only Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala admitted to such pleasures.
One could protest that Meg was a misogynist portrait: she is seen from Nick’s angle and again it’s this fear of her cuckolding him — so typical of male works. I thought Lindsay Duncan transcended the role with sheer acting ability and what she conveyed — she is angry at him, and getting back. She did not spend her life in even a semi-prestigious place, and is losing her place in the world too. I did remark I liked that Lindsay Duncan was the star and think she is not paid enough respect in the way of the older great English actresses who garner queens (Mirren), duchesses (Smith), poignant and strong leads (Dench) or are known for their feminism (Walter, Thompson). She began her great career in the National Theater and played important parts in the great plays of the ’50s and ’60s, was a powerful corrupt wealthy woman in the 1997 Tom Jones, Lady Catherine in Lost in Austen, seen in such older women roles I can’t list them all, but will end on her recent appearance in the recent Sherlocks.
I liked the pathos of it all — and the man who is the success Moran was to my mind exposed — marries a young French woman for sex. He does do Nick justice and we may hope will help the couple return to the UK.
Having now watched My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammie and Rosie I realize this let’s drop the curtain here so we can have a moment of congenial enjoyment as the movie closes is Kureishi’s way of satisfying his producers (who would probably not want the downbeat ending in all three cases the movie implies) and gaining more audience.
As you suggest, we can discuss it for real — it’s not drivel or unconscious unexamined projection (Breaking Bad) or distortion when examined (Downton Abbey). Ellen
My friend resembled Nick’s character physically, so that triggered the connection. But I think there are many older white men in the UK who actually look like that. I like what you say about the actress Lindsay Duncan, but I still didn’t find the couple’s actions believable. For me that was the main problem with the film. Jeff Bloomberg was also a stroke of brilliant. Moran? Perhaps we can think of moron here, like the other morons who seem to “make it”! For all his charm, he managed to be both sad and obnoxious.
Yes, there is much pathos in the film — certainly the attempt to say something meaningful is laudable.
Elaine
Personal response: Jim and I had a way of living that way (so to speak) until in the later 1990s the whirligig of time put him in a position in gov’t where he did make a big enough salary to live in the middle class style — without bills catching up to us. People do it — huge debts accumulated by US people still — though as the middle class here is impoverished they do simply not try to have whatever they might think good time at all.
Yes Moran is something of a moron and his adoring wife doesn’t know it at all. All sorts of ironies. Again having watched the earlier films, I’d say Kureishi has given these characters more ironic treatment than he did his earlier ones.