Andrew Haigh’s second feature follows two men in Nottingham from a Friday-night pick-up to Sunday evening, and it is small, plain and mostly talk. It is also as true a British love story as we can name, though Glen speaks for his writer a little too often.
Andrew Haigh wrote, directed and edited Weekend, and the tagline called it “a (sort of) love story between two guys over a cold weekend in October”. That is the whole of it. Russell and Glen meet in a club on Friday night in Nottingham and spend most of the next two days in each other’s company, talking, drinking, taking things, going to bed. Nothing else happens. It is a small film and a fine one, and we would recommend it to anyone who can sit still for a conversation.
The scene that sets the terms comes the morning after. Glen (Chris New) sits on the edge of Russell’s bed with a tape recorder and asks him to describe, precisely, what they did the night before. It is for an art project, he says: what people say about sex afterwards, and who they say it for. Russell (Tom Cullen) pulls the duvet up and mumbles. We laughed at him, and then the laugh caught, because New keeps pushing and Cullen keeps flinching and the scene stops being about sex and becomes about a man who has never once said out loud what he wants. Haigh holds the shot and lets it happen.
Urszula Pontikos shoots much of the film from a long way off. Russell is seen through the window of his flat, from across a car park, at the far end of a tram platform, a small figure in a dark coat under a grey sky. When the camera does come close it stays close for a long time, in the flat, on a bed, across a kitchen table. Sarah Finlay’s design gives Russell a tidy flat with almost nothing in it and a view over the city he spends a good deal of the film looking at. James Edward Barker’s music is used so sparingly that when it arrives you notice, which is the point.
The two performances are built differently. Cullen plays Russell as a man who has arranged his life so nobody has to look at him: he is out, but only just, and only to people who already know. New plays Glen fast and loud, a man with a theory about everything, most of them about how gay men are made to shrink themselves so straight people can feel comfortable. In a pub on Saturday night two men at the next table (Mark Devenport and Steve Blackman, each credited as Straight Man in Bar) object to the pair of them, and Glen will not let it go while Russell wants only to leave. Haigh lets us see that both are right and neither is happy about it.
Glen is also where the film is weakest. Some of his speeches, about marriage, about coming out, about what straight audiences will tolerate on screen, sound less like a man talking to a lover than a writer clearing his throat, and New is good enough that you wish he had been handed fewer of them. The long Saturday night, fuelled by drink and drugs, runs on past the point where the talk is telling us anything new. And Jonathan Race and Laura Freeman, as Jamie and Jill, are warm and exact in their few scenes and could have done with more. Their Sunday afternoon is the only look we get at the life Russell is deciding whether to stay in.
Most critics reach for Before Sunrise, and the shape is the same: two strangers, a city, a clock. Haigh’s film is colder and more English than Linklater’s. His characters are not charming for our benefit. They are awkward, funny by accident, and often unkind to each other in the way people are when they have started to care and have not yet admitted it. The realism sits closer to Loach or Leigh than to any romance, and the sex is explicit and treated as ordinary, which in a British film with an 18 certificate is rarer than it should be.
We will not describe the last ten minutes. We will say that they moved us more than we thought a film this quiet could, and that nothing in them is a device we had not seen before. What did it was the previous eighty-odd minutes: we knew exactly what each man had learned to say and exactly what it would cost him to say it. Ninety-six minutes, two actors, one town. Watch it on a cold night in, and do not put your phone within reach.
