Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent (Music Box)

When you get as old as Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent), you appreciate the value of life and existence and have seen too many lives cut short before their time. The same doesn’t quite apply to this powerful but flawed movie. Le Week-End is only 93 minutes, but a judicious cut would have saved its ending and made a nice round number.

Meg and Nick are a British couple celebrating thirty years of marriage. Except at this point, there isn’t much to celebrate, their interactions a bitter spectrum of antagonism and neglect. But they’ve taken a long weekend in Paris, the site of their honeymoon, to try to rekindle the embers of their relationship.

It’s Before Midnight for an older generation, but even more acidic and much less EthanHawkeisacelebratedauthor-y. The movie’s early reels unfold with an acute anxiety, not just of love on the rocks but of the discomfort of travel and the passage of time. You can almost feel the couple struggle with their luggage, sense the warm flush of frustration and shame when the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon turns out to be unsuitable.

Le Week-End marks the reunion of an aging creative pair, director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. This is their fourth project together since The Buddha of Suburbia 20 years ago, and that first collaboration remains their best (I swear, I sat next to Dr. Ruth Westheimer at the FilmFest DC screenings of Buddha in ’94). Michell and Kureishi still know how to make characters come alive, and Broadbent and Duncan are flawless in their imperfect humanity. But the script falters as domestic drama turns to contrived farce, and the couple runs out on an expensive dinner check. What is this, Frances Ha? Worse, the pair runs into Nick’s old friend Morgan, a successful writer with a wife half his age and a smarminess you have come to expect from characters played by Jeff Goldblum. Morgan finds the couple sharing a passionate kiss and invites them to a dinner party at his swanky Paris apartment, which naturally becomes a setting for public confession and awkward renewal.

The two leads keep this mostly watchable, if uncomfortable, but there are a few embarrassing moments that Michell-Kureishi would never have stooped to before. I hope it was a producer’s bright idea to have Broadbent stare passively at his cold wife while listening to “Like a Rolling Stone” on his iPod. Worst is the homage to Godard’s Band of Outsiders, a bit of crowd-pleasing nostalgia that is decidedly out of place in such a cynical, bittersweet film. (And not that despite the film’s title, this is not an apparent tribute to the social satire of a later Godard film). Le Week-End hits enough of its marks to be an effective drama, but I recommend walking out the second you see Goldblum return near the end of the movie.

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Le Week-End
Directed by Roger Michell
Written by Hanif Kureishi
With Lindsay Duncan, Jim Broadbent, Jeff Goldblum
Rated R for language and some sexual content
Running time 93 minutes
Opens today at Landmark Bethesda Row, AMC Shirlington (in 35mm) and Cinema Arts Theatre.