'Weekend' Takes an Honest Look at Gay Life

R (strong language, drug use, sexual content); 86 min.

How do you reinvent a story that has been told a million times before? In the case of Andrew Haigh’s terrific British film Weekend, you invest it with intelligence, heart and precise attention to detail. – and suddenly a shopworn tale takes on an urgency and freshness that sets it apart from anything else in theaters right now.

Russell (Tom Cullen) is a gay guy with mostly straight friends who meets a handsome, confident fellow named Glen (Chris New?) at a bar. late one Friday night. Both of them expect it to be just a one-night hookup, but over coffee the next on Saturday morning, they get to talking. Glen is an artist whose work reckons with questions of sex and intimacy, and he interviews Russell for his latest project. Earnest and romantic, Russell – who works as a lifeguard but who clearly hasn’t found his place in the world – can’t help but wonder if a relationship might blossom.

Written and directed by Haigh (his previous feature, 2009’s Greek Pete, is available on DVD), and shot on sometimes grungy-looking digital video, Weekend has a ragged, almost tossed-off vibe. But the casualness of the images belies the scope and bravery of the writing and acting. Scene after scene, Haigh and his superb leads illuminate the most subtle of emotional states: the shy uneasiness of Russell, who is out of the closet but doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with his sexuality; the mixed signals sent off by Glen, who seems constitutionally opposed to the idea of being someone’s boyfriend; and the struggle many modern gay men now face, between wanting to assimilate into a larger society and wanting to hang onto an “outsider” identity. Without tipping over into explicitness, the film also manages to be refreshingly frank about sex, and the ways physical intimacy gets conflated with emotional intimacy, especially in this era of “friends with benefits” and “no strings attached.”

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Haigh emphasized that he doesn’t want the film to be ghettoized. He said, “I wanted to be part of that mountain of just films, and not just be compared to gay films." That’s a valid point; the marvel of Weekend is that it’s completely attuned to details of modern gay life, yet entirely universal – the conflicts and feelings would be the same regardless of the gender of the characters.

But I also wonder if the filmmaker hasn’t sold his achievement short. Weekend – which first showed at this year’s South by Southwest in Austin and is one of the strongest films that festival has ever premiered -- follows in the landmark footsteps of such gay-themed classics as Poison, My Own Private Idaho and Brokeback Mountain, and then does something none of those films did: It treats the will-they-or-won’t-they-live-happily-ever-after? romance between two men as something utterly, gloriously matter-of-fact.

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