by A. O. Scott
The collapse of sexual taboos has caused some trouble for love, or at least for love stories. That sex often precedes emotional intimacy — or proceeds without it — is a fact of life that movies, with their deep and longstanding investment in romance, especially have a hard time dealing with. Contemporary sexual mores tend to be explored either with grim, punitive realism (as in Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” soon to play at the New York Film Festival) or with cute and careful wishful thinking.
Comedies like “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits” strain to adapt the ethics of the modern bedroom to tidy and traditional marriage plots (though not always with benefit of clergy). What starts as zipless lust winds up in a longing for commitment. The desires of the flesh rarely spare the heart.
You can’t really fault Hollywood, an empire built on fantasies of heterosexual happiness, for simplifying such complex matters. But there is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat.
“Weekend,” Andrew Haigh’s astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film. In its matter-of-fact, tightly focused observation of two young men who find their one-night stand growing into something more serious, the movie ranges over vast, often neglected regions of 21st-century life. It is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era, and also about the enduring mystery of sexual attraction and its consequences.
Shot in a little more than two weeks and taking place over a little more than two days, “Weekend” is also, even primarily, about the leisure-time activities of ordinary British young people, who go to clubs and children’s birthday parties, settle in to marriage or seek out casual sex, and unwind after work with beer, hashish and takeout curries.
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The collapse of sexual taboos has caused some trouble for love, or at least for love stories. That sex often precedes emotional intimacy — or proceeds without it — is a fact of life that movies, with their deep and longstanding investment in romance, especially have a hard time dealing with. Contemporary sexual mores tend to be explored either with grim, punitive realism (as in Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” soon to play at the New York Film Festival) or with cute and careful wishful thinking.
Comedies like “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits” strain to adapt the ethics of the modern bedroom to tidy and traditional marriage plots (though not always with benefit of clergy). What starts as zipless lust winds up in a longing for commitment. The desires of the flesh rarely spare the heart. You can’t really fault Hollywood, an empire built on fantasies of heterosexual happiness, for simplifying such complex matters. But there is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat.
“Weekend,” Andrew Haigh’s astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film. In its matter-of-fact, tightly focused observation of two young men who find their one-night stand growing into something more serious, the movie ranges over vast, often neglected regions of 21st-century life. It is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era, and also about the enduring mystery of sexual attraction and its consequences.
Shot in a little more than two weeks and taking place over a little more than two days, “Weekend” is also, even primarily, about the leisure-time activities of ordinary British young people, who go to clubs and children’s birthday parties, settle in to marriage or seek out casual sex, and unwind after work with beer, hashish and takeout curries.
Read more:
