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Film: Le Week-end (15)

JEFF SAWTELL recommends a film about a couple seeking to rekindle their youthful passions in Paris

Le Week-end (15)

Directed by Roger Mitchell

4 Stars

Le Week-end should resonate with those who wish to remember the pains and pleasures of falling in love and returning to the scene of the crime.

This third collaboration between director Roger Mitchell and writer Hanif Kureishi is a bitter-sweet romantic comedy that will confound critics of their last two films.

Opening aboard Eurostar, the film introduces us to a middle-aged couple showing all the signs of ennui and irritation that accompany most long-term relationships.

They're Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) who're heading for Paris to mark their 30th anniversary in the place they spent their honeymoon.

Arriving in Montmartre, they find it steeper than they remember and the tiny upstairs hotel room has been painted "bloody beige."

Having been annoyed by Nick's obsessive behaviour, Meg decides to flee - a flight for freedom.

Then Nick, trying to resist, takes a tumble and after Meg's hailed a taxi, they do the the tourist sights of the City of Light at breakneck speed.

She wants some luxury, since their whole life's been a compromise, and they book into the best hotel around. It little matters that Tony Blair stayed there because "they've changed the sheets."

We learn that Nick's being forced into early retirement from his university post for transgressing the rules and she fancies something more exotic than teaching. They joke about becoming artists.

To revisit their intellectual aspirations, and revisit a past that's a manufacture of fact and fiction, they go to the Pere Lachaise cemetery.

And, like seasoned travellers, they choose restaurants on price and popularity, rather than reading the guide.Having run out of the readies, they resort to a hilarious runner.

Yet they're continually dragged back to reality, with the calls from their ne'er-do-well son and the fact that their sexual life has been a "closed book" and there's a beautifully tender yet painful moment as Meg, in lingerie, tempts Nick.

Enter the excellent Jeff Goldblum as the oleaginous Morgan, an old US friend and Cambridge colleague, who's just written a best-seller and is sporting a new trophy wife.

He invites them to a dinner party of so-called cosmopolitan intellectuals who anyone with an ounce of rebellion would massacre - except they're temporarily seduced.

Yet it provides a profound moment of truth which has them questioning their values while illustrating the emptiness of life without imagination.

This might have come across as wallowing self-pity, yet that's sidestepped in scenes delivered as a caricature of the Last Supper.

Duncan, as ever the elegant woman, and the brilliant Broadbent, with his stick-insect awkwardness, make a compelling odd couple.

In their efforts to combine British realism and French surrealism, Mitchell's direction and Kureishi's script transcend the cliches with panache.

Sharp and witty, the film references the changing times from the couple's bohemian youth through to the nightmares of Margaret Thatcher and our current crop of parasites.

Mitchell's middle-class musings and Kurdish's more working-class concerns combine to produce a feel-good film without the syrup - well, perhaps there's a soupcon.

Being mature, they appear to suggest, doesn't discount the idea of chancing your arm and challenging cynicism. No doubt congenital sceptics will cringe.

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