Anyone who's ever had a romantic week-end away with a significant other can't fail to be swept up by this utterly charming comedy drama. More so if that relationship has some years behind it, even more so if that week-end was in Paris. Written by Hanif Kureshi (Venus) and directed by Roger Michel (Notting Hill), Le Week-End fires from beginning to end with wit, pathos and the surefire understanding that love and hate are but a heart-beat apart.

Nick (Jim Broadbent - The Iron Lady) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) hope to rejuvenate their long marriage with a short break in Paris. Nick is a recently sacked academic clinging to the certainty of his wife. “I'm surprised how mediocre I've become,” he laments. She's a teacher desperate to feel something new, some carefree frisson from a relationship that, if not exactly stale, is certainly worn about the edges. Arriving at a tiny hotel, a shabby reminder of a holiday long ago, Meg snatches their wallet of euros and heads for five star luxury, igniting the first of many life-affirming actions the couple will make.

Kureshi's script effortlessly captures the simple truth of any long-term relationship with all its confliction and complications, and whose characters' foibles so perfectly reflect our own. As the couple wander Paris by day and night (“The last time we did this,” puffs Nick as they slowly climb steps outside the Sacré Coeur, “I could breathe.”), they laugh and fight, hug and squabble about who they are, and how they got there and how they're going to get away.

Duncan is a terrific presence as she twists and turns on Meg's inner turmoil while Broadbent dials back his familiar mania to create a credible, conflicted man. Jeff Goldblum as Nick's highly-successful acquaintance opens out the story, saving it from introspective implosions that bedevil Richard Linklater's Before series to which this is a close cousin. And unlike Linklater, Kureshi gives his couple room to breath, to be silent, to enjoy each others company without the need to fill every space with endless yak. Accordingly, Le Week-End is a sophisticated, elegant and frequently hilarious account of living with a significant other: love 'em or hate 'em.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed at Paramount Theatrette, Sydney, on 29 August 2013