We’ll always have Paris; at least on the silver screen. And when it comes to food and film you could do much worse than spending a couple of days in the City of Light. My housemate and great friend was away in Paris last weekend with her beau and I suffered from mini-break envy to an extent not experienced since Bridget Jones was still a singleton in ardent pursuit of Mr D’Arcy.
Several eateries in Dublin could have offered some solace: The Paris Bakery, for example, has a mean patisserie and a staff as Gallic as they come this side of the mainland. Chez Max is offering an excellent deal for lunch: a main (tartine or salad), wine and coffee for just over 10 euro and elbow room so restricted and a room so dark and cosy in its Dublin Castle premises that you will feel like you are wearing a black polo neck and earnestly discussing your next ménage à trois. Being the unrepentant film addict I am, however, I decided to get my fix of menu prix-fixe by going to the cinema to watch Roger Michell’s Le Week-End.
A commendably nuanced script by Hanif Kurieshi sees Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) –a Birmingham-based married couple nearing retirement– returning to Paris thirty years after their honeymoon to celebrate their anniversary. Kurieshi and Michell turn the trope of Paris as the city of nascent love on its head, and instead present it as the possible burial ground for a marriage in crisis. Not incidentally, a fine scene takes the couple to Beckett’s grave in Pierre Lachaise cemetery, where Nick muses on the playwright’s line “Do we mean love when we say love?” The answer is explored in the film through the brewing up of a storm that is Kurieshi’s script: his male protagonist provides an increasingly overcast horizon, opalescently grey at the beginning and lead-almost-black by the closing scenes; his female protagonist is hot and cold in flightily successive turns, providing the sparks that can break into lightning in a matter of seconds.
It is impossible to set a film starring an educated middle-class couple in Paris without staging several scenes in restaurants. It would be like setting a film in Vegas without a casino and a stripper, unthinkable. The challenge is to incorporate what is a Paris staple, its fine gastronomic tradition, into an exploration of marriage on the verge of dissolution, and Le Week-End meets the challenge well. For starters it recognises the theatrical potential of restaurants as places where several mini-dramas unfold simultaneously, each confined to its own narrow table space and privately-conceived conflict. In their first foraging adventure in Paris, Nick and Meg ogle and dismiss several restaurants before settling for the one bistro that can provide the complexity of their relationship with the right stage. The sequence is finely staggered, with Meg leading the couple in their uncompromising search for the right place. Nick merely acquiesces and follows his restless hard-to-please wife, reflecting his increasing forbearance in his hope for his wife’s acceptance; an acceptance that is as fraught with disappointment as her rejection of the succeeding eateries, and much slower to come.
Michell frames the couple side by side at the bistro and their sitting momentarily brings them together and highlights the camaraderie of old spouses. She offers him a taste of her bisque, he a bite of his dish. There is more intimacy in this exchange of morsels of food than in an exchange of bodily fluids. As you observe their un-showy closeness, you expect a successful rapprochement: food can do this to us. It can bring us a back and bring us closer. Kurieshi, nonetheless, has different ideas for his characters and more restaurants to play with. The resolution is slow burning and far from ready to be served to the viewer.
A second outing takes the couple to an upscale oyster bar: the food does not live up to its libidinous promise and Meg suggests the possibility of separation to her husband. He calls it a last supper and asks her to pay. Things are once more shaken off course by her sudden taste for adventure. To reveal more would be to spoil your appetite for a film worth watching. Suffice to say that, like all dramas set in France, including one with two English protagonists, Le Week-End finds its resolution at the close of a dinner party where the truth outs in need of a stiff drink: perhaps a cognac with a taste as mature and complex as the relationship explored in the film.
A Fistful of Olives 