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"FacebookPinterest\n\n When we first meet Russell (Tom Cullen), the extraordinarily ordinary bloke at the center of writer-director Andrew Haigh's Weekend, he doesn't make us yearn right off the bat to spend a whole movie in his diffident company. In fact, it's possible to imagine him being the first to say so, just to forestall our disappointment. Yet, one reason our first impression is misleading is that we're introduced to Russell in the marooned, distracted mode he lapses into around his straight friends. They're already in their parenting years, making him the odd man out in more ways than one.\n\n Even at the pickup joint he heads off to afterward, though, he isn't especially in his element. Not because he's uptight about his sexuality; he just doesn't think he's much of a catch. \"I thought you were out of my league,\" he tells Glen (Chris New) when they wake up in Russell's apartment after a one-night stand.\n\n As obnoxiously sure of his own charm as Russell is unassuming about his, Glen doesn't bother to contradict him. But all the same, they meet up again after Russell gets off work as a lifeguard at a municipal swimming pool. They spend the rest of the weekend having sex, getting high\u2014and above all, talking about everything under the sun. Last comes their airport goodbye, when Glen leaves for the three-year stint abroad that he's only belatedly gotten around to mentioning to Russell.\n\n That's all there is to the movie, and yet Weekend\u2014no relation, needless to say, to the 1967 Jean-Luc Godard classic of the same name\u2014is an uncommonly involving experience. That's not least because Haigh doesn't over-lyricize or over-sentimentalize the strangers-in-the-night side of his material. He isn't showing us a thwarted romance for the ages, just an evolving human encounter between one man who insists he doesn't need one (\"I don't do boyfriends,\" Glen says, a bit too aggressively to be completely convincing) and another who isn't sure he deserves one. Nor is there any implication that it will be a tragedy if these two never see each other again. They've had their weekend, that's all, and any shift in their attitudes as a result could just as easily end up benefiting instead whomever they meet next.\n\n Even though the men have obviously been conceived as contrasting types\u2014and their sometimes woozy, sometimes cranky dialogue does pretty much cover the waterfront of contemporary gay life\u2014Haigh's treatment never feels schematic. He's more interested in the tiny details that keep them individuated, like the way Russell keeps compulsively calling Glen by name to anchor him and Glen never reciprocates. On top of that, the director has also been lucky in finding the right actors: Cullen and New are both superb. The demands on them range from long passages of talk, where every nuance of vocal inflection and body language counts, to startlingly intimate sex scenes, but they never miss a beat or stray from utter naturalism.\n\n True enough, Haigh's movie is unlikely to find much of an audience in Alabama\u2014except maybe on DVD, anyhow. But unless you're still hopelessly stuck at the \"Eww, guys kissing\" stage of development, the irony is that Weekend incorporates candor about how human beings behave in bed into a larger view of what they're like the rest of the time, with much less self-consciousness than most of the straight equivalents. It may be a small movie, but that doesn't mean it's a minor one."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-weekend-review>