One of those flings, but much more

BRITISH director Andrew Haigh's film Weekend is among the most sensitive and moving studies of a gay relationship.

Weekend

WEEKEND is a love story, the second feature of British director Andrew Haigh. Russell (Tom Cullen) works as a lifesaver at a public swimming pool in Nottingham. One night in a bar he is attracted to an artist. They go back to his place and begin a wild weekend of booze, drugs and casual sex.

Soon they discover they're in love (or think they are), until the artist reveals plans to spend two years studying in the US. Is this the end of the affair?

If Weekend were a conventional boy-girl romance, it might be quickly forgotten. Not a great deal happens here. But the artist (if you haven't guessed) is a guy, played by Chris New, and Haigh's film is among the most sensitive and moving studies of a gay relationship. Its strength lies in its mood of quiet understatement, of unassertiveness.

Haigh isn't about pushing gay rights attitudes or causes. (There's actually a scene in which Russell and Glen discuss same-sex marriage and take opposing views.) This is a love story in which the sex of the characters hardly matters. What matters are trust, intimacy, commitment, depths of emotion that somehow transcend sexuality.

Essentially it's a two-hander, with many long-held shots of Glen and Russell talking. With their dark, close-cut beards they look pretty much alike, and their performances have a startling candour and naturalness. The sex, like the language, is graphic and explicit - this is not a film for Rick Santorum or Fred Nile - but I defy even the most conventionally minded not be to be moved.

Haigh has acknowledged a debt to Karel Reisz's 1961 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of the first British films to identify with an underclass and tackle issues of social prejudice. That, too, was set in a rundown housing block, and there's a nice moment when we see Glen wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of Reisz's film. Weekend is a work of comparable honesty and power.

Weekend (MA15+)
 3 ½ stars
Selected cinemas nationally