Weekend

This is what the British writer-director Andrew Haigh achieves, brilliantly, with a story of two days in the intersecting lives of Russell and Glen. A municipal pool lifeguard who is cautiously, selectively out of the closet, Russell is godfather to the daughter of his oldest and best friend (Jonathan Race), with whom he has never really discussed his romantic life.

"You've been keeping a low profile recently. Anything to tell?" his friend asks, knowing he won't get any details.

Soon enough, there's a lot to tell. Russell picks up the combustible, militant Glen at a gay bar one night. A gallery employee heading off to the U.S. in a couple of days, Glen is a series of defense maneuvers disguised as a human being — manic, sarcastic, a relentless objectifier, terrified of real intimacy.

What seems destined for a quick morning-after coffee and then goodbye develops, unexpectedly, into a more complicated and vulnerable proto-relationship. Shot on unusually supple digital video by cinematographer Ula Pontikos, "Weekend" was filmed quickly, in 16 days, in Nottingham, England, near the same East Midlands urban landscapes stalked by a dissatisfied Albert Finney in "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" back in 1961. The subject matter's very different here, and fairly explicit. But Haigh's training as an editor serves him superbly as he charts the landscape of this newfound territory. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the social realist milieu of director Andrea Arnold ("Red Road," "Fish Tank"), but Haigh gives "Weekend" his own unpredictable rhythms and moments of revelation, always with an eye toward the honest detail.
Two days. So much can happen to change two lives in two days. "Weekend," one of the year's very best in any genre, reminds you that a so-called "relationship movie" needn't bother with conscious attempts to strike chords of universality.

All a filmmaker can do is burrow into the relationship at hand and trust that its depiction will mean something t

Chicago Tribune
Copyright Michael Phillips