Title: Weekend
Year: 2011
Language: English
Country: UK
Genre: Drama, Romance
Director: Andrew Haigh
Writer: Andrew Haigh
Cast:
Tom Cullen
Chris New
Laura Freeman
Jonathan Race
Rating: 8/10

A peerless matter-of-fact approach of a gay romance-drama, I watched it for the first time end of last year in the cinema, but due to the fact I’m not a native English speaker, English subtitles were unavailable and the fast-speaking dialogue-crammed script was muffled and sheerly beyond my comprehension, so I have waited almost 4 months to eventually watched it again with fully equipped subtitles, and a second viewing testifies that the film is superb among its coequals.

Starting by a nightclub cruising, two gay men conjoined in a weekend’s love affair, basically it is a story about two right guys meet at a wrong time, a nearly fly-on-the-wall narrative with two leads’ brilliantly naturalistic interpretation, the film fearlessly explores the boundary of contemporary gay-life in UK, its incisively casual conversations cover the inconvenient truth which even outgrows the gay clique, the complexity of humanity, a disguised personage and attempt to be somebody else, all feels so familiar and resonates with one particular part per se.

Director-writer Andrew Haigh discards any sumptuous gimmicks and dedicates a sincere, unaffected encounter, filled with subtle details to elevate the contexts of emotional turbulence. Two leader actors are so amazingly hitting it off since the early start, it is such a pleasure to watch them arguing about petty matters since they have different POVs, different philosophy of their lives, but meanwhile their relationship is thriving and their screen chemistry is cogently ample and the augmenting charisma is plain, simple, but scorching, which haunts the viewers until the last shot, the ending is genuinely heartfelt as well.

The film has a neat production and shooting environment, its ultra-limited scale notwithstanding, it explores a universally harrowing conundrum (one’s true being) which has an immensely large market, so if it could only survive in the gay-circuit film festival, it will be a crying shame, this film is literally for everyone!!