Lorna Irvine reviews 'one of the most moving, funny and heartfelt films of the year'.
This portrait of sex and the over-sixties is one of the most moving, funny and heartfelt films of the year. From the bickering over Euros on the train at the offset to the cheeky Godard dance routine at the end, Roger Michell's astute direction of two Brits abroad never falters.
Nick (Jim Broadbent) is a staid, Nick Drake loving hippy teacher with faded dreams of becoming a novelist. He takes free-spirited but cynical wife Meg, (Lindsay Duncan) also a teacher, to Paris for their thirtieth anniversary, and it's not long before the disparities in their personalities look set to become a chasm, setting divorce proceedings in motion.
Old Cambridge friend of Nick's, Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), has, on paper at least, the perfect life: the bourgeois house, trophy wife and bestselling books. A chance encounter sees him bump into the couple on the street and thus a re-evaluation of their marriage ensues, with spliff smoking, running out of restaurants without paying and a great deal of soul searching.
What could have been a trite, throwaway or predictably sentimental foray into rom-com territory is given a bitter, chewy texture by Hanif Kureshi's outstanding script—there's not a wasted line in it, and Duncan and Broadbent's chemistry together is gorgeous. How wonderful to see an honest (re)appraisal of a marriage, with all the nit-picking, frustrations and tenderness of older age. Kureshi may not quite be in Buddha Of Suburbia mode here, yet time has not blunted his pen's nib...this is not a euphemism.
This could well be the finest performance of Broadbent's career—his explosion at Morgan's pretentious dinner party soiree, palpable sexual frustration when his wife won't let him touch her or realisation that he is losing her, is so full of impotent despair that it is devastating. Similarly, his drunken dance scenes to Bob Dylan and raised eyebrows at Morgan's hubris are a joy to behold.
The homage to Godard's 1964 classic Bande A Part and the gorgeous later period music of Nick Drake cements this autumnal Parisian poem beautifully. For anyone bruised by love, in or out of love, and in love with French cinema. An absolute treat.
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