Glancing at the promotional posters for "Le Week-End" — with their romantic shots of the Eiffel Tower and a beaming, laughing couple — you might suspect this is a warm, fuzzy rom-com for the over-50 set. Paris is for lovers, as they say, and it's easy to imagine a long-married couple revisiting their honeymoon haunts and rekindling the flame.
With a script by Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Launderette," "London Kills Me"), though, I was expecting something sharper, and "Le Week-End" certainly delivered — right from the moment 60-something couple Nick and Meg (played by Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) lug their bags up the cobbled streets of Montmartre, only to find their old honeymoon hotel a dingy, run-down shell of what it once was, and Meg declares, "I knew this trip would be a f-cking disaster."
From that point on, the film is a battle between Nick's attempts to charm his wife and Meg's general exasperation with her husband's neediness. Broadbent and Duncan walk a very fine line, creating a couple in whom we detect real, hard-earned affection and intimacy, but who also have a history of pent-up resentments that threaten to boil over at any time.