Weekend: The Gay Movie We’ve Been Waiting For

After years of watching “gay movies,” one knows the kind of stigma that’s attached to the label: namely that a “gay movie” will be bad, poorly scripted, bad, with gratuitous prettyboy flesh, bad, and above all, bad, especially if it’s made by a gay filmmaker. For gay romance stories, examples of such movies that aren’t totally tragic, deeply dysfunctional, a coming of age/coming out narrative, made by a queer, and are actually good come few and far between. But writer/producer/director Andrew Haigh’s second feature, Weekend, which opened this past week at New York’s IFC Center is a stunning exception.

I won’t give you a full rundown of the plot, because you can get that anywhere, but what I can say is that you won’t see a gay romance film as emotionally insightful and elegantly articulated than Weekend. Never straying into heavy-handedness or reductive emotional positions that overshadow the characters, Weekend embraces difference and complexity. The ambivalence that accompany the two main characters render authentic their emotional lives and it is just that—the uneasy realness of feelings sans tragedy, sans self-indulgent self-loathing, and sans sentimentality that makes Weekend so startlingly lovely.