Le Weekend

This weekend, I happened to watch 'Le Weekend' with my parents, staring Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan .

We didn't actually make it to the end of the film after stopping midway at my mum's request. I didn't particularly mind cutting the film short as I had lost interest after about 20 minutes, but she explained her reasoning was this:

The dreary grey colours and back-lit rooms the film were shot in made the whole story dull and made it seem slow moving. It had an air of lethargy about it, and the lack of non-diegetic sound  in places where there was a dire need for it made it painful to try and concentrate. After stopping, my mum told me that on the 'love film' website who had sent her the film, there was a review from the one other person who had ordered it - completely trashing it.

I  thought there seemed to be very long shots, and the camera stayed still for much of the time. It also stayed a long way away from the actors, and often looked from the darkness into a lit room. For a film that was supposed to be watching a British couple try to harness the romance of Paris to fix their marriage, the mise-en-scene was very dull and grey. The imperial suite the couple stay in appears drained, possibly due to a camera filter. Large expanses of cobbled grey road backed with white clouds and the plain clothes of the actors made it genuinely hard to keep interested in what the film had to say.

We will never know how 'Le weekend' ended or if the couple saved their marriage, but Paris seemed extremely unromantic  throughout their stay.