Le Week-end: CALL Discussion Notes

The Brits Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) Burrows splurge on a 30th wedding anniversary weekend in Paris. Both enjoyed long careers as teachers, but Nick’s has ended on a sour note of political incorrectness. Their married pothead son with rats in the home they bought him wants to move back with them, but first Meg, then Nick, refuses.The couple can barely afford this trip yet impulsively splurge. At Meg’s initiative they walk out on a restaurant bill. Later they’re imperilled by their unpayable hotel bill. 
      The marriage has some apparent tensions. Nick suspects Meg is unfaithful, while Meg can't forget -- not to say forgive -- his fling several years ago with a young student. Now she sometimes avoids his touch and sometimes solicits it. They play games, often based on Nick's having cultivated his feminine side and Meg her masculine.

A chance meeting with Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), Nick’s old Cambridge friend, leads to the couple’s invitation to his dinner party. There we might contrast the value in Nick’s apparent failure to the emptiness of Morgan’s apparent success. Before dinner Meg accepts another man’s invitation out, while Nick gets stoned with Morgan’s alienated son, over for the weekend from New York. At the dinner Morgan’s pregnant new wife toasts him, Morgan generously salutes his mentor Nick and Nick unloads a speech of excoriating self-awareness and candour. It embarrasses everyone but Morgan’s son, who is delighted by the rare honesty (“Awesome”). In the last scene Morgan arrives to bail his old friend out. The three break into the dance that we earlier saw in a TV clip from Bande a Part, the 1964 film by the icon of the revolutionary 60s, Jean-Luc Godard. 

You might like to consider the following questions.

1. In the title, does the French modify the English, the English the French, or both, and what’s the point?
2. A second honeymoon in Paris promises romance. Does this deliver? (Be careful.)
3. Why are the central couple called Burrows?
4. On the train Meg is reading Elegance of the Hedgehog. How is the title relevant? In Muriel Barbery's novel an apparently stereotypical concierge and an apparently shallow preteen hide their complex true natures from an insensitive world. So?
5. How does the film use our characters’ — and our assumed — Francophilia? (i.e., the love of France, not frankness.)
6. Are the old radicals still freedom fighters? How so?
7. How do the allusions to and clip from Godard’s Bande a Part (The Outsiders) resonate?”
8. Ditto Dylan’s “How does it feel to be on your own?” (Like a Rolling Stone)
9. What’s the point of Nick’s hotel room collage? Art a Part.
10. How is our sense of the couple altered by the shifting tone of their bickering? 
11. What’s the significance of the last shot? The first? (High shot of railroads tracks approaching Paris). How are the train passengers there characterized? 
12. In a British film set in Paris why make Morgan an American?
13. How does the film relate to director Roger Michell’s earlier Notting Hill, Changing Lanes, Venus and Hyde Park on Hudson?
14. And how to screenwriter Hanif Kareshi’s My Beautiful Launderette, Sammie and Rosie Get Laid, London Kills Me, Venus?
15. Why is Nick presented as “an anarchist on the left”?
16. “Like Noah, this is a film less about plot than character.” Discuss.
17. The British couple are not from London but from the dreary industrial midlands, Birmingham. Oui? 
18. How does the film draw on Goldblum’s persona, i.e., smooth ‘60s Hippie. In the West Coast party scene in Annie Hall (1977) he’s on the phone to his guru: “I forgot again. What’s my mantra?” Does his character's name suggest anything? 'Morgen' is German for 'tomorrow.'
19. How does the new film contrast Morgan’s and Nick’s respective honesty?
20. Morgan's Rivoli apartment has the Hitchcock vertigo staircase. Why?
21. How do these lines of dialogue resonate:

“You can’t not love and hate the same person.”

“I’ve become a phobic object to you.”

“How great is that! To be so finely tuned to your unhappiness.”

“I want more of myself.”

“Even his emails are loud.”

“I finally found a psychiatrist who told me what I wanted to hear.”

   Morgan's "I love you."