England

It’s tempting to declare “Weekend” a major step forward for gay-oriented cinema, but that’s too much freight to carry for an idiosyncratic little film that’s very much its own thing. Let’s say instead that it’s another terrific auteur-driven indie out of the dynamic British scene, and that adventurous film buffs of all genders and orientations should check it out. It definitely belongs to a modest wave of gay-centric movies that are leaving old cinematic stereotypes behind; Haigh isn’t trying to reassure straight viewers that homos are nice and normal and “just like us,” and isn’t trying to pump up the self-esteem of gay viewers with lame clichés or parables of noble suffering. Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), who meet one night in a perfectly appalling disco in the English city of Nottingham and wind up spending the weekend together, are neither saints nor victims. They do lots of drugs, are both insecure in various ways and hold conflicted and possibly hypocritical opinions about love and sex. If it becomes increasingly obvious over the course of the weekend that they’re falling in love, they also know that’s a violation of the unwritten code of cool, young, gay-dude conduct.

I’ve long maintained that gay-straight cinematic equality will finally arrive when a character’s sexuality, however interesting or titillating it may be, is not seen as delivering an important message about tolerance or self-empowerment or some other boring abstraction. I liked both “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Kids Are All Right” a lot, but there’s no doubt they’re both finely crafted teachable moments. The examples I relish are few and far between: Kristin Scott Thomas as the protagonist’s lesbian best friend in “Tell No One,” Kieran Culkin as the title character’s gay roommate in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” Demetri Martin as the gay hero of “Taking Woodstock” (although his character’s sexuality is, if anything, too irrelevant). No, gentlemen, I’m not including the numerous films where allegedly lesbian characters are introduced as salacious male-fantasy side dishes. I don’t judge you for finding that arousing, believe me! But it doesn’t count.

As in so many other areas of culture, the 1980s were way ahead of the present: Pedro Almodóvar’s “Law of Desire” and Stephen Frears’ “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” for instance, anticipated this trend by 20 years or more. But if those movies helped spawn the self-involved, studiously transgressive art-house ghetto called “queer cinema” (which never reached beyond a tiny minority of the LGBT public), they had startlingly little effect on the world of mainstream cinema, which remains committed to tried and true models, even in the age of gay marriage and openly gay military personnel. Gays in the movies can be suffering heroes, objects of pity, opportunities for the audience to demonstrate its superior compassion and/or dishy best pals. They are hardly ever just people.

Clearly the sexuality of the guys in “Weekend” is a central issue, and the film’s presentation of gay sex is funny, raw, raunchy and frank (although there’s little nudity and no NC-17 content, if you’re wondering). Oddly, though, by confronting the audience’s mixed emotions about homosexuality directly, Haigh eventually gets to a place where it doesn’t matter that much. By the final scenes of “Weekend,” it’s no longer a film about the sexual-political issues Russell and Glen quarrel over or the class-divided, unprepossessing social and geographic landscape of Nottingham — which Haigh captures beautifully — or the pervasive cultural climate of homophobia. We move through all that stuff and end up with a story about two people who are suddenly and unexpectedly besotted with each other and don’t know what to do about it, which is incredibly specific in this case but also just about as universal as you can get.

Russell, a handsome, bearded fellow with a reserved and slightly ironic demeanor, is what’s sometimes called a “straight-acting” gay man, who works as a lifeguard at a Nottingham public pool. He lives in that nebulous zone partway between the closet and not; he’s out to his friends (who are primarily straight) but not at work. He doesn’t have a boyfriend and walking down the street he looks like an average bloke. He’s never going to be the focus of the free-floating homophobic taunting that seems ubiquitous in the public spaces of his working-class neighborhood. I’m tempted to suggest that Haigh overemphasizes this hovering sense of menace but, honestly, who am I to say? I’ve never had to worry that a public display of affection might provoke a stranger to violence, or to belong to a despised minority amid the laddish, depressed culture of a place like Nottingham.

Glen, who admits to Russell after their first night together that his first choice in the dreadful club was another guy who turned him down, is quite another kettle of fish. He’s an aspiring artist with a stylish haircut and a tight-fitting Provincetown T-shirt, and has the angry, somewhat dogmatic queer-radical opinions to match. In describing his long-brewing art project, which involves audio recordings of gay men talking about their sex lives, Glen almost seems to be describing the commercial future of the movie he’s in. “Gays will only come because they’re hoping to see some cock, and they’ll be disappointed. And straights won’t come because it’s about gay sex. They’ll come to see things about famine, rape, disease, whatever. But not gay sex, not that!”

Glen and Russell argue fearfully over gay marriage — predictably, Glen thinks it’s an idiotic bourgeois concession and Russell talks, quite movingly, about why he finds it both beautiful and daring. But let’s face it, when two people start arguing about marriage right after they’ve first had sex, they’re in deep trouble. (There are a couple of nice supporting characters, including Russell’s straight best friend and Glen’s catty female roommate — I won’t use the derogatory term, but we all know it — but the focus on the two guys is very tight.) “Weekend” eloquently divides between cinematographer Urszula Pontikos’ intimate close-ups of the two men in Russell’s apartment and daring, ultra-long shots of them as they wander the streets of Nottingham, gradually becoming a little braver about facing the catcalls of strangers. (Glen, who’s a compact but powerful little guy, offers to rape someone “in all your holes” after an abusive comment.) But this incipient romance comes with an asterisk, over and above the fact that Glen is implacably opposed, on philosophical grounds, to boyfriends: He’s going away in a day or two, to art school in Portland, Ore. For at least two years and more likely forever. (I’m not sure that too many people come back to Nottingham after leaving.)

But you can’t file “Weekend” under “OK, gay version of ‘Before Sunrise’” and just walk away. If you want to call it an exceptionally intelligent and self-aware gay version of “Before Sunrise,” which is simultaneously about the specific problems of two guys in a nowheresville English city and also a heartbreaking story about the ubiquitous human tendency to screw things up and fail to communicate and not quite get what we want, then fair enough. Gay viewers should welcome “Weekend” as one of the bravest, most honest and most accomplished stories of gay love and sex ever rendered on film, while for at least some straight viewers, it may be an eye-opening exercise in the kind of emotional translation that gay people presumably engage in all the time. Even saying all that is underselling a film that’s probably a bit too smart and ambitious to reach the audience it deserves, and knows it too. Go see it for yourself, that’s all.

“Weekend” opens Sept. 23 in New York and Sept. 30 in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow. 

I don’t simply mean that the film “W.E.” is sad and silly and sweet, although those are good words for it. The whole evening had those qualities. Madonna was pursued on the red carpet by an impressive phalanx of photographers, and there were several hundred fans on the sidewalk outside Roy Thomson Hall who screamed in joy on her arrival. (Despite rumors of her prickly backstage behavior here, she worked the outside crowd generously.) Both as the lights went down in the theater and as the final credits rolled, several people in the audience shouted, “Thank you, Madonna!” and had to be shushed severely. In her opening remarks before the film, Madonna got a huge ovation when she said that, as a native of Detroit, she felt “almost Canadian,” and a big laugh for joking about her near-arrest by Toronto police in 1991 for simulated onstage masturbation.

But in the wake of “W.E.’s” reportedly disastrous Venice premiere, the Toronto screening was not even close to a sellout. There were banks of empty seats in the Roy Thomson upper reaches, and the press section where I sat was barely half-full. Harvey Weinstein, whose company will distribute “W.E.” in the United States, was not present, and the film’s theatrical and commercial future appears uncertain. But Canadians are a kind and polite people, especially compared to the boorish audiences at Venice, and there was no booing and catcalling at all, and a generous round of applause at the end. Were we applauding “W.E.” for not being as bad as all that, applauding Madonna to make her feel better, or applauding ourselves for being such a nice, supportive audience? All of the above.

You can’t call “W.E.” a total disaster; it’s too pretty, too nonsensical and finally too insignificant for that. Rather, it’s a heavily decorated and overly complicated exercise in female narcissism, which in its plotless meandering fashion seeks to draw a mystical connection between an unhappy Manhattan wife (Abbie Cornish), circa 1998, and Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the Baltimore socialite who married King Edward VIII. Riseborough gives a richly enjoyable performance as the prickly, strange and not especially beautiful American who pulled a king and emperor from his throne, and some of the 1930s scenes are pretty fun, after the fashion of outtakes from “The King’s Speech” turned into music videos or haute couture shoots. Madonna and co-writer Alek Keshishian (who directed “Truth or Dare” way back in 1991) go right at the historical reputation of Wallis and Edward as Nazi sympathizers, and to the extent that “W.E.” is an attempt to rehabilitate them at least it has a clear agenda.

But even having seen the movie I can’t figure out what mistreated, ultra-rich 1990s Manhattan housewife Wally (Cornish) is doing in it. OK, she was named after Wallis Simpson and has always been fascinated with her, and an auction of Wallis-and-Edward memorabilia at Sotheby’s serves as her introduction to a deadly handsome Russian security guard (Oscar Isaac) who also plays concert-level Rachmaninoff and has a conveniently dead wife. It’s tempting to conclude that Cornish’s character is a therapeutic stand-in for Madonna, who has acknowledged comparing herself to Wallis Simpson — an American expatriate from humble origins who used shrewdness, sexuality and an intimate understanding of fashion and ritual to pull herself to the top of aristocratic Europe’s social pyramid.

Once you get through the atrocious early scenes, “W.E.” becomes a reasonably watchable and mostly non-narrative curiosity, a handsome fantasy mounted by someone who has no storytelling ability and no connection to real life. It’s entirely possible that a radical re-edit could find a more normal seeming movie about the marriage of Wallis and Edward (James D’Arcy), but one that would require abandoning Madonna’s crackpot central conceit, in which Wallis and Wally occasionally converse across the decades, offering advice and consolation one Material Girl to another. But whether we defend it or deride it, “W.E.” just doesn’t matter. It’s an inconsequential footnote to the declining career of an immense pop superstar, one who is battling irrelevance with all her might but can’t fend it off forever.