Andrew Haigh (2011)
Andrew Haigh also wrote the screenplay and edited what is virtually a two-hander. Weekend describes the relationship of Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), from their first meeting in a gay bar in Nottingham late one Friday evening to Glen’s departure from the city’s train station less than forty-eight hours later. What both expected to be a one night stand turns out to be something much more. Russell is a lifeguard at a swimming baths. Glen is an artist – about to leave Nottingham for Portland, Oregon, where he’s going to do some kind of art course. Russell is tall, dark and gentle: he was brought up in care and foster homes. Glen is smaller and spikier, in appearance and by temperament: he chose Mother’s Day as the occasion to tell his parents he was gay. Russell keeps a private written record of each of his sexual encounters. Glen always records onto a dictaphone or similar the morning-after impressions of the man he’s just slept with: he explains to Russell, the latest interviewee, that it’s an art project. Russell doesn’t advertise his sexuality but he seems relaxed about it and he interacts amiably with the straight world. Glen is angrily resentful of what he sees as the tyranny of the heterosexual establishment – its expectation that gays will, for example, imitate the structure of straight partnerships as unobtrusively as possible. He’s so exercised by this that Glen resists the idea of having ‘a boyfriend’. These contrasts between the two men illustrate the neat construction and the limitations of Andrew Haigh’s screenplay. On its own terms, Weekend is well done: it’s just not interesting.
Richard Brody wrote a scathing note on Weekend in the New Yorker but the film and its lead actors have been enthusiastically praised on both sides of the Atlantic: it’s won nominations and prizes at several festivals and currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 95% positive, based on 59 reviews. What Tom Cullen and Chris New do is certainly remarkable in terms of the nuanced emotional connections and the extent of physical intimacy between them. We spend virtually the whole film with Russell and Glen and we get to know them well. Midway through Saturday, Russell already seems to have come a way from the young man sharing a takeaway with (straight) friends the previous evening – you seem to remember him from much longer ago. Cullen and New both do fine work. (I don’t remember seeing Cullen before. I had seen New, and liked him, as Joe Orton in the stage version of Prick Up Your Ears in 2009.) Even so, I ended up thinking that this kind of piece is a gift for actors – or at least for good actors who have the courage to do it in the first place (and it does take courage). In a drama involving more people and incident, the cast have less opportunity to develop their characters and impose their personalities. A disadvantage of being under unusually relentless scrutiny is, of course, that it’s easier to spot falsity. And although there are no crude signs of it in Weekend, Tom Cullen and Chris New are not absolutely believable: Richard Brody’s not entirely wrong, though he’s harsh, about their prepared naturalness.
The greatest reality in Weekend comes from the physical and social settings, which made me feel despondent during and after the film. When Haigh and his DoP Urszula Pontis shoot a block of flats or a garage forecourt or, especially, Nottingham train station late on a Sunday afternoon, the locations have an effortless, impalpable bleakness. But watching Russell and his friends having that convivial takeaway or hearing the guests, at Glen’s going away do, shouting over the loud music had the same effect on me too – so did the sequences, back at Russell’s flat, when he and Glen are doing drugs or getting drunker. The worst thing of all was the jar of Maxwell House. It’s because of this depressing texture, rather than the characters, that I think Weekend will stay with me. I’m not sure that’s what Andrew Haigh intended.
22 November 2011
