"Le Week-End"

Friday evening I went to see "Le Week-End", a recent movie about an elderly English couple who spend a weekend in Paris and ... things happen.  I'll try not to spoil it, in case any of you wants to go see it.

I decided to go on the spur of the moment: the review in our local paper was mixed, and I wasn't completely sure I felt like watching a movie about an elderly couple – whether it turned out to be bitter or heartwarming, I figured it might go down wrong just now.  But the theater was directly on my way home from work, and I happened to pass it just in time for the next showing, and so I thought "What the hell? How far wrong can I go?"

During the first half hour of the movie I found myself re-evaluating that cavalier question, and I nearly walked out at least three times.  This couple had been married thirty years (same as Wife and I), and they bickered in a way that was painfully familiar.  Several times I just couldn't watch the screen because the characters were passing through an interchange or snatch of dialogue that I had lived through too many times to be able to tolerate it again.  Those were the times I nearly walked out.  But I told myself that I'd paid for the ticket and that it's only a movie, and so I stayed in my seat. 

Finally the characters started going in directions that weren't so familiar, directions that Wife and I could probably never have gone.  I think it won't spoil anything to tell you that they find that they value enough in each other to see a way out of the dead-end they had backed themselves into.  And certainly the denouement of the movie was a complete surprise to me, although it was based rigorously on situations set up right at the beginning and fleshed out all the way through.  In other words, the movie doesn't cheat – everything happens for reasons that make perfect sense – but I would never have guessed it ahead of time.

And in a way they end up, this couple, in a mental space that has a lot more room in it for failure than they allowed themselves at the beginning.  They are willing to do things and accept things that would have been non-starters before.  In that sense, even though it's easy to say "Well I'd never want that to happen to me," the ending is oddly hopeful. 

I'm not sure I would want to see it again (cutting as it does just a little too close to the bone) but it wasn't a bad way to spend a couple of hours.  I guess I'm glad I didn't walk out.