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On Movies: Broadbent gets a chance to be the lead in 'Le Week-End'

Jim Broadbent received the new script - written by Hanif Kureishi, with director Roger Michell ready to make it - on a Friday, and agreed on Monday morning to star in the film. It took just one weekend to decide to make Le Week-End. How could he not?

In "Le Week-End," Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play a long-married couple trying to rediscover past joys with a trip to Paris.
In "Le Week-End," Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play a long-married couple trying to rediscover past joys with a trip to Paris.Read more

Jim Broadbent received the new script - written by Hanif Kureishi, with director Roger Michell ready to make it - on a Friday, and agreed on Monday morning to star in the film. It took just one weekend to decide to make Le Week-End. How could he not?

"It says so much about relationships, marriage, our age," noted Broadbent, who plays Nick Burrows, a philosophy professor whose career is fading fast.

Burrows is on a weekend jaunt to Paris with his wife, Meg - Lindsay Duncan - a secondary school teacher. It is the British couple's 30th anniversary. They've been to the City of Light before, but not in years, and the bickering begins on the Eurostar train over.

Bickering and arguments - but also accommodation, affection, intimacy. All the ups and downs of a lived-in relationship, played out against the romantic, gourmandic Eiffel Tower and Montmartre backdrop of one of the most splendid cities on the planet.

"There's a line my character Nick says in the film: 'You can't not love and hate the same person - usually within the space of five minutes,' " Broadbent said. "There was so much I recognized in the script, with Lindsay's character and my character, so much of it was familiar. I identified, I understood, sympathized, and empathized. It resonated."

Broadbent, 64, is one of Britain's busiest character actors. He was Horace Slughorn in two Harry Potter installments. He played Denis Thatcher, the husband in the shadows, opposite Meryl Streep's fearsome prime minister in 2011's The Iron Lady. He was the Gilbert half of the legendary light opera duo Gilbert and Sullivan in one of Mike Leigh's best films, 1999's Topsy-Turvy.

Broadbent has played authors, gangsters, barristers, royals. But he rarely gets to take the lead, which was another reason he was drawn to Le Week-End. He and Duncan had played husband and wife before, in the 2006 HBO telefilm Longford, but her role wasn't the focus. It was the Golden Globe-winning true story of Labour Party MP Lord Langford, who led a long campaign for the release of a convicted murderer (played by Samantha Morton).

In Le Week-End, it's pretty much just Broadbent and Duncan, joined for a lively interlude or two by Jeff Goldblum as a friend and fellow academic whom Nick and Meg run into on a Paris street.

"We shot the film largely in chronological order," Broadbent explained. "And Jeff turned up for the last week, really. That fitted in very nicely with the arc of the film, and the arc of the filming . . . .

"He has a totally different energy to our British energy. It was a blessed relief, in a way." Broadbent said, laughing. "A third actor coming in with such a dynamic energy and excitement, with such joy, and he pitched it perfectly, he was wonderful."

Broadbent has been married almost as long as his Nick has - to Anastasia Lewis, a stage designer. It was another way he responded to Kureishi and Michell's project: He and his wife had played out many of the same scenes, if not specifically, then in the same spirit.

The idea for Le Week-End - which opens Friday at the Ritz Five, the County Theater, the Ambler Theater, and the Bryn Mawr Film Institute - has its origins in 2006, when screenwriter Kureishi and director Michell were in Paris, promoting their Peter O'Toole gem, Venus. They bounced around the city, and kicked around the notion of a married couple on a second honeymoon.

There are nods to French New Wave god Jean-Luc Godard, and a great moment with Broadbent, earbuds in, rocking to Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" in a fancy hotel room. ("They kept the camera going on that for quite a while - in a way, it was a tough scene.")

In a very funny bit, Nick and Meg opt for dinner in a dauntingly pricey restaurant. When the check comes, they try to make a run for it.

"Have I ever skipped out on a check? No, I don't think I have," Broadbent confessed. "I'm slightly embarrassed not to have done, really. I was irresponsible in other ways in my youth, but I never quite had the nerve to do a runner."

Gonna fly now. Oscar-winning director John Avildsen was in town recently - his first time here since 1990, when he reteamed with Sylvester Stallone for Rocky V. The occasion was a screening of the first Rocky, the 1977 Academy Award-winning best picture, unspooling inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

There's a newly restored Blu-ray version - the colors vibrant, the snowflakes falling on the pugilist's Kensington street corner vivid and clear - and Avildsen was happy to talk up his low-budget, big-success endeavor.

"I've never seen it look so good," he said about Rocky's digital upgrade - part of the "Rocky Heavyweight collection" Blu-ray DVD set, which includes all six Rocky installments and more bells and whistles than you'd hear in a boxing match that goes the distance.

Alvidsen said that unlike many of the titles in his filmography (an impressive one, boasting such hits as Save the Tiger, The Karate Kid trilogy, and Lean On Me), there's hardly a moment from the original Rocky that he'd go back and change. Just one scene at the end, really, when Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) have finished their epic slugfest in the Spectrum, with Rocky's gal, Adrian (Talia Shire) and her wheedling butcher brother, Paulie (Burt Young), looking on.

"Usually the movie is never finished, they [the studio] take it away at a certain point," Avildsen said. "But there's only one shot that I didn't get that I wish I had gotten, and that's at the very end when Adrian's coming into the ring and she calls Paulie's name. And the last time we saw them together they were yelling at each other. So, we see her looking up at him.

"And I would liked to have gotten a shot of him looking back at her, so that we see that they'd buried the hatchet. But otherwise, I am very pleased."

As for the new Broadway musical adaptation, Avildsen hasn't seen it yet, but he probably will. And the idea makes sense.

"Why not?" he said. "It's a love story, and love stories make terrific musicals."

On Movies: MOVIE

Le Week-End

Opens Friday at the Ritz Cinemas.EndText

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