There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, “What is going on?” You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all that.
Sometimes you don’t want to escape. You want to connect with a movie that’s really about something, to listen to a filmmaker talk things out, to watch him amp everyday life without calling attention to his turning up the sound.
You want to see a guy contemplate getting dressed; open a box of Nikes, then put it away; maybe get stoned; head to a friend’s dinner party, then go out to a Nottingham club where he’ll meet another guy, take him home, and spend the next day and a half getting to know him so well that, come Sunday, he’s in love. You want to see intimacy, yes. But what you get is “Weekend,” one of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.
The writer, director and editor Andrew Haigh uses a realism that extends entirely from the point of view of Russell (Tom Cullen), who’s kind-eyed and openly gay but conservatively so. He doesn’t discuss his relationships. When he makes an early exit from that dinner party and heads to the nightclub where he finds himself drawn to a little guy in a small, dark T-shirt, he doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going. His sense of privacy amounts to gentlemanly decorum. But it’s compromised and challenged the moment the man the T-shirt was wearing, Glen (Chris New), awakes the morning after and asks Russell to speak into his tape recorder about the night before. It’s for some willfully provocative art project — the type of stunt we’ll all be talking about when Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama “Shame,” with Michael Fassbender, opens this year.
Haigh is more interested in quiet emotional surprise than erotic shock. Glen expects Russell to be lewd. He’s full of sweetness, instead. “I thought you were out of my league,” Russell says, and Glen’s face goes blank. Haigh has paired two opposites. Glen takes chances (he’s days away from art school in Portland, Ore.). Russell, it seems, takes none (he works as a swimming pool lifeguard). Glen instigates and foments. Russell retreats. The movie explores the gray area between their differences. They have a lot of help. Saturday night, these two drink and do a lot of drugs — innovatively, it must be said. Neither is as wasted as he probably should be, but the idea is that all the cocaine and alcohol allows each man to be less inhibited about who he really is.
The achievement of the acting and its direction is that neither man remains a stranger to us. Cullen and New are London stage actors, and their transparency makes their emotional achievement easy to take for granted. But these are two intelligent, startlingly subtle performances.
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Movie review
“Weekend”
Grade: A
Starring Tom Cullen and Chris New. Directed by Andrew Haigh.
Unrated (contains sex and drugs). At Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema. 1 hour, 36 minutes.
Bottom line: True and beautiful.
