I basically hated Le Week-End until the last 15 minutes of the movie. I wouldn’t exactly say I liked the film in the end, but it did in its final moments somehow manage to charm me somewhat, and reshape my memory of the despised initial 75 minutes of the film, although it’s rather difficult to say exactly how it accomplished this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where something like this has happened.

In Le Week-End, an old, British, academic hippie couple (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) spends a week-end in Paris stoking the fires of their contempt for each other – they do appear to love each other, but only as a combination of obligation, inertia, and a residue of the long extinguished fantasies of their youth. Occasionally they grow tired of expressing their mutual contempt, during which periods they run around acting crazy and committing various crimes. Eventually they run into Jeff Goldberg, an intensely weird old college chum of Jim Broadbent’s from their 1960’s hippy days at Cambridge, and their visit to his house produces the film’s final 15 minutes.

This movie is so bizarre, I really don’t know what to say about it, except that it appears to me to be an expression of a very particular kind of Baby Boomer angst. Not being a Baby Boomer, and not having been raised by Baby Boomers, I can’t say for sure. But the film positively reeks of that Boomer sentiment that the world was their fucking oyster, and then they either wound up accumulating a shit load of money and a trophy wife (Jeff Goldblum), or they wound up filled with conceited regret and anger, yet still dazzled by their own slowly rotting self-love (Broadbent, Duncan). I think Le Week-End is a kind of discordant paean to the Boomer outlook on life, one that is somewhat (but not totally) beyond my ability to understand and empathize with.

How can I possibly recommend a film that is so basically repugnant until the very end? On the other hand, how can I not recommend something so truly bizarre and different? I guess I do recommend it, with the following extremely large caveat. Le Week-End is not the light romantic comedy implied by its trailer, so just don’t expect anything funny, uplifting or heartwarming. Go in prepared for something strange and somewhat off-putting which eventually resolves in a semi-coherent but semi-enjoyable way, and you probably won’t be seriously disappointed. I don’t know what kind of recommendation that is, but there you have it!