Weekend @ 10: A Modern Gay Classic
Friday, September 24, 2021 at 8:21AM 
Ten years ago, Andrew Haigh's Weekend opened in American theaters after a long travail through international film festivals. The director's second feature put his name on the map and opened up an artistic path that would bring us such precious cinematic gems as 45 Years and Lean on Pete, as well as the televisual delights of Looking. Contextualizing the work in such ways makes it seem even smaller than it already is, a miniature of gay urbanite life and the emotional ties that blossom from a night of casual sex. Despite the limited scope of all his projects, everything Haigh has done since Weekend feels much larger, more conspicuously ambitious. And yet, a decade later, that small British indie still stands as the director's most remarkable achievement…
Looking at Weekend as a 27-year-old is very different than watching it as a teenager. Once upon a time, I felt as if Haigh's picture opened a magical window into life experiences I had yet to go through. It felt natural, vibrating with the genuine power of observational details and behavioral insights. Nevertheless, it was somehow distant too. Revisiting the work, a decade after the fact, there's little innocent wonderment left, nor is there that particular awe of the curious teenaged mind in how I look at Weekend. However, that idea of distance persists, mutated into different shapes. As ever, the film hasn't changed. Instead, I have grown up, lived through events that make me appreciate the movie as a crystallizer of ineffable truths rather than a surreptitious glimpse.
Before, it was vaguely aspirational, even though Haigh and company offer little in the ways of dreamy idealization, lacing every sweet kiss with bitter sorrow. Now, the movie feels more candid, valuable for how it captures intimacy on film with an ease that's uncommon, unvarnished, but not unerotic. In some ways, the very intimacy implies a shared vulnerability that bears a promise of privacy, if not secrecy. Such characteristics make its capture on-screen a paradoxical conundrum. How can any facsimile of intimacy appear actual when the very presence of the camera, the audience's probing eye, molds what we see into a public pantomime? Film intimacy should never feel real, but sometimes, as if by miracle, it does. In Weekend, it burns.
Examining the film through a structural-minded prism, one finds more obstacles than avenues into the sort of calcinating closeness that Haigh achieves. The story is simple to the point of cliché, built upon a clash of contrasting personalities that could flatten fictional people into archetypal forces. On the one hand, we have Russell, a taciturn Nottinghamian nester. He isn't necessarily ashamed of his sexuality, though he prefers to pass unnoticed, unremarked upon, including by his closest friends. Opposite him, there's Glen, an outgoing artistic type who fills the silences Russell keeps around with the wet sounds of sex and the probing chatter of a man on a mission. Silence is a hole waiting to be filled, penetrated, one might crudely conclude. The silent bloke, in this scenario, is certainly open to having some loudness coming inside his cosmos of quiet.
In any case, after waking up from a drunken one-night-stand, Russell's morning is invaded by a tape recorder and questions about the carnal pleasure he can barely remember past the haze of a contented buzz. As the old saying goes, opposites attract. Not that Russell and Glen are necessarily antithetical. The script's construction even includes a scene where the pair finds common ground through similar backstories. Their secret biographies are bound by experiences common to many gay men from their generation and general background. However, it's not that expected bit of written commonality that shores away from the potential for dialectic counterpoints. Indeed, it's how specific each actor makes their character and how Haigh insists on framing both men that do the trick.
The camera often feels like a brusque pursuer within public spaces, unsubtly looking around objects, people, to check on the central pair. At points, it recalls the long-lensed across-the-street shots of Ken Loach's Kes. Other times, the artlessness of the whole endeavor conveys an abrasive feeling of undue intrusions, like when we find Russell and Glen on the train, sharing muffled words that we can barely hear while a wall of diffuse bodies keeps getting in the way. Mumblecore twisted into claustrophobia could be a descriptor of this approach. We're never inside the couple's bubble, and that inaccessibility grounds the act. The instant of their first contact isn't experienced by some beautiful feat of subjective filmmaking.
Instead, we witness it from an angle, a crossed look the camera struggles to view through reflections and focus shifts. Haigh's beguiling Weekend is incredibly close to its characters, but they keep getting away. Slipping through the cracks, the men move with the eagerness to go live their lives outside the limits of the letterboxed screen. At home, the camera's closer, as one would expect, but the actors seem aware of its bothersome materiality in the cramped spaces of a small apartment. Entire scenes are played with backs facing the camera. Significant interactions are lost to us by virtue of their voyeuristic limitations. As Russell, Tom Cullen often looks away from the lens, telegraphing an idea of closed-off domesticity by suggesting that such sanctity is being violated.
In the role Glen, Chris New feels similarly reluctant to play for the camera, but there's a peacocking delight running underneath. In his hands, such qualities confer a whisper of crumbling theatricality to the artist's performative honesty, giving an edge to the material. These approaches are not set in stone to the actors' credit, varying through the few days of the narrative. Their first shared scenes rumble with that strange openness that can sometimes blossom between strangers when the guarantee of social inconsequence serves as a liberating agent. When deeper emotions start to get in the way, we sense walls erecting in front of each tender man. The desire for meaningful connection is thus played by foregrounding the buzz of anxiety, the shields we hold in hopes of sparing our hearts.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players – that's never more evident than when we contemplate and negotiate around the bonds that tie us to others. Weekend goes further, though, capturing the ruination of those actorly walls. In the weekend-long proto-romance of Russell and Glen, we witness the cyclical return to the raw confidentiality shared by naked men in beds made with sweaty, cum-stained, sheets. What they had might not last more than those erstwhile days. It might all be over with a stolen kiss on a train platform. Nonetheless, the ephemeralness of those treasures doesn't have to rob them of meaning, of beauty. If anything, they're more precious this way. Haigh has devised a calcinating variation of cinematic intimacy by avoiding a lusher subjectivity. His Weekend is a miracle, always looked on from a distance, behind a fence, so close, yet so far.
Weekend is streaming on the Criterion Channel, AMC+, DirecTV, and Realeyz. You can also rent it on several platforms.
10|25|50|75|100, Andrew Haigh, Chris New, LGBTQ+, Tom Cullen, Weekend
Reader Comments (6)
My favorite from that year. Stone cold classic.
There are so many stories about romance/carnality that sort of happen between two people, and especially between gay men. This, for me, is up there with Before Sunrise/Sunset and Brief Encounter. It just captures this moment between two people with such beauty and energy.
I really appreciate how you wrote about how this film ages, especially for gay men. I've revisted it as I've made my way from my early 20s into my late-30s, and I think the fact that it still has a ton of depth, even as I've had more of my own Weekends, indicates how powerful it is. Can't wait to revisit it again in 5 or so years.
So good. The only other movie I wouldn’t mind a a Before Sunset like sequel.
This was an incredible film and certainly touching as it felt more like watching 2 guys who dig each other and weren't afraid of being sensitive. I too would say yes for a sequel.
"Weekend" has become an all-time favorite of mine. I've watched it dozens of times and still gets me. Sad that Chris New didn't break out of this film the way Tom Cullen sort of did, and it seems that New is now stepping away from acting altogether.
Andrew Haigh has also become a very strong director. I haven't been disappointed by anything he has done since "Weekend."
"Weekend" has become an all-time favorite of mine. I've watched it dozens of times and still gets me. Sad that Chris New didn't break out of this film the way Tom Cullen sort of did, and it seems that New is now stepping away from acting altogether.
Andrew Haigh has also become a very strong director. I haven't been disappointed by anything he has done since "Weekend."