General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Le Week-End

Le Week-End is a 2013 British comedy-drama directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, in which a long-married British couple, Nick and Meg, return to Paris for a weekend in an attempt to revive their marriage. It stars Jim Broadbent as Nick, Lindsay Duncan as Meg, and Jeff Goldblum as Morgan, an American friend of Nick's from Cambridge days who now lives in Paris.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Roger Michell / Hanif Kureishi, their fourth collaboration after The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), The Mother (2003), and Venus (2006)³
Cast	Jim Broadbent (Nick), Lindsay Duncan (Meg), Jeff Goldblum (Morgan)¹
Runtime / release	93 minutes; UK release 11 October 2013⁴
Production	Free Range Films and Film4; producer Kevin Loader⁵
Awards	Silver Shell for Best Actor for Jim Broadbent at San Sebastián; five 2013 BIFA nominations, with Duncan winning Best Actress⁶^•²
Reception	89% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (152 reviews); Metascore 73; US gross $2.2 million⁵^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Nick and Meg, a British couple in their late fifties, live in Birmingham, where Meg teaches biology at a comprehensive school and Nick lectures in philosophy at what Kureishi described as an unfashionable university. Nick has booked them into the same Paris hotel where they spent their honeymoon thirty years earlier, a decision Meg immediately rejects; she instead demands a room at one of the city's most luxurious hotels, far beyond their price range, and puts it on her credit card.²

Over the weekend the couple argue about sex, their children, and whether to stay together, while trying to recover the idealism and political commitment of their youth. On their first night they meet Morgan, a rich and famous American writer married to a young French woman expecting his child, who invites them to a dinner party for his latest book. The evening unsettles them, and ends badly when Nick confesses he has lost his university job for insulting a student. Back at the hotel they find their room cleared and their belongings held because Meg's card has been refused; they flee to a working-class cafe with a few euros, and finally call Morgan, who arrives to pay their bills.²

Origins and production

The idea came from Michell and Kureishi's promotional travels for Venus, the 2006 film that earned Peter O'Toole his last Oscar nomination. "We had lots of airplane flights and came up with this idea of a couple going to Paris for 48 hours as a very easy and beautiful structure," Michell told the Los Angeles Times. The two then took their own 48-hour trip to Paris to outline characters and plot, staying in a hotel they disliked and arguing over restaurants, and the film took six years to develop.⁸

Michell described the film's subject as a deliberate departure from most love stories: "Most love stories are about the beginnings... This is all very different, because it's about the end of something — maybe."⁸ The shoot was completed in a month, with natural light used so the emphasis stayed on the performances, and the actors helped the naturalistic script evolve.³ The part of Morgan was written with Jeff Goldblum in mind and tailored to him once he agreed to play it.⁹

Reception

The film premiered in official selection at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and screened at the New York Film Festival in September and October 2013, where Michell, Loader, Duncan, and Broadbent appeared in person.¹⁰^•¹¹ At the 60th San Sebastián Film Festival, Broadbent won the Silver Shell for Best Actor.⁶ The film received five 2013 British Independent Film Award nominations, for Best British Independent Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor, and Duncan's performance won the BIFA for Best Actress.²

Critics responded strongly to the two leads. Sight and Sound's Lisa Mullen wrote that Broadbent's "effortless authenticity" gave Nick an "almost unbearable pathos" while Duncan embodied "the brutal crisis of identity that comes with faded beauty."¹ The Telegraph called it "sophisticated, sharp and funny," noting it was a film about older characters that was neither deeply gloomy nor cheerfully upbeat.⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 89% Tomatometer from 152 reviews, with a critics' consensus describing "a sophisticated, well-acted portrait of late-life struggles and long-term marriage," though the audience score is lower at 57%.⁵ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 73, with 79% of its 29 collected reviews positive and none negative.⁷

Release

After the UK release on 11 October 2013, the film rolled out across Europe into 2014: Spain on 5 December 2013, Germany on 30 January 2014, Sweden on 28 February 2014, Belgium and France on 5 March 2014, the Netherlands on 27 March 2014, and Italy on 12 June 2014.⁴ Music Box Films released it in the United States in limited theaters on March 14, 2014, where it grossed $2.2 million.⁵

The film closes with a homage to Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders, using music from that film, which the Lincoln Center program called one of the loveliest movie homages in years.¹¹^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2013 to 2014 › Titles J to W

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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