Weekend
Written & directed by Andrew Haigh
Glendale Picture Company
THERE’S A SCENE at around twenty minutes into the movie Weekend when the protagonist, a British lifeguard named Russell, stands at the edge of a swimming pool, just below a sign reading “Deep End” that foreshadows where he’s headed. At that point in the film, Russell has gone to a gay bar and picked up a man named Glen, who defies the usual expectation of fleeing the scene the next morning and instead curls up beside Russell with a tape recorder, demanding that he relive the pickup from beginning to end. The interview forces Russell to confess things he finds embarrassingly intimate. He was reluctant for Glen to penetrate him, he admits, but not because it was “too gay,” as Glen suggests, but rather, “I just thought that we were having a really nice time. And it was lovely. It was more than enough for me.”
Russell is achingly vulnerable, with wounded dark eyes and fragile emotions visible just below the skin. Glen, conversely, is honest, but he’s not open. He’s more than willing to speak his mind—to scream his mind, sometimes—but he refuses to reveal anything that would render him exposed. He demands others’ stories but shares only those parts of his own that reinforce his self-image as a fearless champion of homosexuality, violating social taboos, insisting that queer people not live in silence or shame. Russell and Glen are representative of their generation of twenty-something gay men, with easy opportunities to hook up but few resources for true intimacy. But in many ways they could be men or women of any era. They fit together because they’re opposites. Glen is all outward bravado and lacks a deeper sense of himself, while Russell is introverted and awkward but quietly more confident and comfortable with who he is. But they also fit together because they’re alike. Both are emotionally isolated and feel a need to record their sexual encounters—Glen through his interviews, Russell in a private journal—as evidence of connection. Russell is played by the Welsh actor Tom Cullen and Glen by Englishman Chris New. This is the feature film debut for both, and they share a persuasive screen chemistry, an ease and tenderness with each other that is seductive to watch. The two actors inhabit these characters with a conviction that matches the look and tone of the film, itself a new, gay take on the kitchen-sink realism of a half-century ago. The necessary plot complication comes after Russell and Glen meet following Russell’s shift at the pool. They return to Russell’s flat, share more personal history, get high, and have sex again. Glen still reveals little, but he’s begun to open himself up to the possibility of feeling something for Russell. While packing up to go, Glen drops the bomb: he’s leaving England for the U.S. the next day, for two years, maybe longer. And suddenly the hookup that grew into something more becomes both hopeless and increasingly precious. Every moment together takes on a new poignancy. Weekend has obvious parallels to films like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, in which characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy build a relationship over a single, long night in Vienna, and also to The Pull, a documentary short from 2008 about a gay couple that decides to break up at an arbitrary, mutually agreed-upon date, so that moments they would have taken for granted gain meaning through their awareness of the relationship’s transience. But Weekend is its own film, and Andrew Haigh, who wrote, directed, produced, and edited the movie, has his own agenda. Haigh suggests that the characters’ isolation is a consequence of the world they live in. The film is set in Nottingham, England, which it depicts as a provincial city with limited options and ample obstacles for gay men. Everywhere Russell and Glen go, they encounter people who are ostentatiously straight: bragging in graphic detail about heterosexual encounters, mocking effeminacy, or simply insisting that gays keep quiet and out of sight. Needless to say, their experience would be altogether different in London, just 100 miles away, but neither man has chosen to go there, and we can see why. Glen’s roommate says Glen likes to be a big fish in a small pond, and that’s clearly what he is when Russell first zeros in on him as the most appealing prospect in the nightclub. Even when Glen decides to move to the U.S., it’s not to New York or San Francisco but to Portland, Oregon. And Russell seems too willing to acquiesce to an unremarkable reality to make such a dramatic move. In his time with Glen, he’s just beginning to realize that he actually is confident in himself. What happens when the fantasy of your hookup’s identity collides with the reality of his personality and his past? Glen wonders aloud: “You know what it’s like when you first sleep with someone you don’t know? You’re like a blank canvas, and it gives you an opportunity to project onto that canvas who you want to be.” Glen isn’t the person he wants to be, but he hopes Russell will believe he is. But when Russell accepts and respects Glen as the artist he wishes to become, Glen’s not sure he can handle it. These men are at a stage of their lives when everything is casual—their clothes, their sex, their drug use. But while they came together easily and casually, it’s not so easy to pull away from one another. When the time comes, it is Glen as much as Russell who’s filled with doubt and regret. As a filmmaker, Andrew Haigh, whose second feature film this is, wants to fill a gap in cinema. When Glen complains that gay people don’t tell their stories in public and that straight narratives are all anyone ever hears, he’s telegraphing Haigh’s own thinking on the matter. Haigh uses the compressed timeline as a tool to explore the lifecycle of a gay male relationship. The characters go through most of the stages in less than 48 hours, from initial attraction to first intimacies, hurtful revelations, philosophical disagreements, shifting roles, and finally acceptance of each other as flawed but worthy people. Jeremy C. Fox is a reporter and freelance writer living in Boston.
