I Can Hardly Remember Anything: Weekend at 10

At the bar, Glen enters a debate with a bar patron who had tried to quiet him as he was telling a bad hookup story to the attendees of his going away party. The camera looks through the branches of sinewy arms to find Glen and said heterosexual debating about who can lay claim to space at the pub, who can assert their loudness, and the structures and institutions that privilege straight people and their way of life. “Everything is there—all the books, all the films, all the TV shows!” Glen says, gesticulating, the straight guy bewildered. He tries to parry: “The sexuality of the loud noise was not an issue with me.” It’s unconvincing, as are most attempts to veil homophobia as a mere irritation. Russell observes this with a sense of bemusement, the kind of thing he would never do: Assert his politics so bombastically and so publicly. But, isn’t that apoliticality also political?

This seeming contradiction—to be shaped by politics but be apart from it—is made apparent as Russell looks into the mirror as we hear Glen say, “Look, straight people like us as long as we conform, we behave by their little rules.” He plays with the shape of his skin, stretches it, checks it for wrinkles, as if he knows that time and political change are lurching forward as his flesh begins to give away its penchant for transformation.

Glen continues: “In America, they went out on the streets and fought for equal rights, and over here people are too busy on fucking Grindr or shaving their asses to be able to do anything!” The exchange is perhaps one of the first times Grindr has been named explicitly in film and, more than that, used as a way to delineate political perspective and action.

Russell argues vehemently about the “radical” nature of gay marriage in the face of bigotry, proclaiming the beauty of loving relationships. Glen is unmoved by this, his fatigue peeking through his weary, coke-addled eyes, and the conversation moves to his future in America. Where it will be different. Maybe.

Glen and Russell are, not so tidily, positioned at different ends of the spectrum as far as gay political thought goes, with Russell not disinclined to assimilationist thought, and Glen vehemently in opposition to it. (He is an artist after all.) But even if there’s a certain normativity to Russell’s point of view, and an indie intimacy that signifies a kind of aesthetic respectability, the crux of Haigh’s drama is in how personal and political memory are inextricable from one another. Russell discloses that, as a child in the foster case system, he never got to come out to his father; they play-act it, performance articulating an alien honesty. He may not say so, but it’s not like Russell is unaware of the same compulsory heterosexuality that Glen speaks of; he simply has a different relationship to it. And though the ways in which these ideological perspectives are placed in (light?) opposition to one another forms much of the film’s drama, their snaking, tangled dynamic is ultimately its focus. These points of view are not so incompatible, or rather their dramatic compatibility relies on there being political difference.

It’s compelling, though, given how much politics is part of Weekend’s DNA that it’s the swoony romance that seems to obliterate the memory of that foundational component, as if the two could be separable. When Weekend appears on “best LGBTQ film” lists, blurbs about it betray a somewhat narrow approach, leaning on its “full-blown love affair” and “profound, possibly unrepeatable connection.” These aren’t necessarily inaccurate evaluations of the film, but they do feel somewhat decontextualized from the milieu (and literal action) that scaffold the very emotion that is praised. Its discursiveness, which is a crucial part of its beauty, feels dismissed.

It’s got its cinematic and social bonafides, well-spoken white gay men in thoughtful conversation, the narrative and aesthetic nods to Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Lean’s Brief Encounter. And, at the end, their lips tremble, they embrace like they’ve only each other to hold, and the telephoto lens zooms in slowly on the two men at a train station, the whooshing sounds of transportation drowning out their words so that their secrets with one another will remain just that. Another film reference maybe, an intertextual Russian doll—Lost in Translation with In the Mood for Love housed inside. Like Weekend itself has swallowed up all these movies about clandestine love, and slicked those elements up in its own DNA. Tony Kushner once wrote about how, during sex, you’ll swallow up to four quarts of someone else’s spit. By Weekend’s final sex scene, they’ve devoured each other’s past and present and future, the personal and the political, and they’ve found its mixture is intoxicating, their lives and ideas forever entangled. Weekend stitches together an open wound, romantically political and politically romantic.

Isn’t Weekend then, implicitly, about memory, the kinds created, the kinds we plumb the depths of to see how they shape us or how we want them to shape us? How we shape and bend memory to our will and whim? Russell’s are concealed, things to be slowly revealed over time, even to his straight best friend; Glen’s are available to anyone and everyone, little performances from the artist. But the alchemy between the two exists somewhere in the middle, as if Glen brings out the beauty of spectacle in revealing oneself and Russell’s revelation helps hone in on a privateness that shimmers in its authenticity and exclusivity. They’ll remember this evening—or if they don’t, it will have changed them irrevocably.