She's famed for playing icy control freaks. But Lindsay Duncan wanted more laughs in her new film Le Week-end. And, really, she'd love to pack it all in and head for India
Happy news for the autumn day: love dies and flesh withers and your nearest and dearest can become your deadliest foe. This, at least, is the set up for Le Week-end, a bitter, biting drama about bitter, biting people; a film that rages against the dying of the light. Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent star as Meg and Nick, a pair of sparring academics whose 30th anniversary hits the buffers as their train pulls into Paris's Gare du Nord. Up ahead we shall find squabbles, misery and the rattling spectre of adultery. "I was always asking for more laughs," Duncan says ruefully. "That didn't get me anywhere."
I meet the actor in a north London cafe, around the corner from her home. It's late afternoon, raining outside, and she has a few hours to spare between recording the voiceover for a documentary and rehearsing a role at the Royal Opera House. Talking about films is a novelty, she says, because she doesn't have a film career, it's really just a sideline. She's known more for her stage work or her appearances in such high-end telly productions as GBH or Shooting the Past. But Le Week-end was shot on the hoof, with a small crew and the performers getting dressed inside Paris apartments, and that's the way she likes to work. She makes the whole experience sound like a joyous, airy dance. On screen, it feels more akin to hell.
Le Week-end is scripted by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell and scratches hard at its themes of middle-class, middle-aged discontent. Nick is in the process of being drummed out of his faculty post and feels his promise has been squandered. Meg wants to have an affair and quit her teaching job, and treats her partner with an overweening contempt. On a walk through Montmartre, she knocks him to the cobblestones and then laughs in his face. It is at this point, I'm guessing, that most viewers will decide they like Nick more than Meg.
"I did worry about sympathy," Duncan admits. "Jim is such a hugely sympathetic actor and Nick is such a sympathetic character. And I thought that this film has got to be balanced or what's the point? It's not the story of a beleaguered bloke. You've got to feel for both of them, you've got to see it all." She points out that while she knows Michell well and has worked with Broadbent before, she had never met Kureishi before taking the role. "I was the only girl in the mix, working with all the men, and I felt I had to fight Meg's corner a little bit. It's undeniable that the character is acerbic and I love that about her." She sighs and sips her tea. "But you have to make sure there's some warmth and compassion."
Off-screen, Duncan remains happily married to fellow actor Hilton McRae, whom she first met when they were working at the Royal Shakespeare Company back in the mid-1980s. The couple have a son, Cal, who just turned 22 and works as the manager of an indie band. But marriage is complicated, she says, and every relationship is like a quest undertaken by two people. Small wonder that there are points along the road when one party starts to doubt the viability of the other. Where Jim Broadbent stands as an inherently warm screen presence, his co-star's image is rather more flinty. It has been Duncan's fate down the years to find herself cast as country-house beauties with a chip of ice at the core, although she bridles at the easy shorthand. In person, at least today, she seems entirely approachable, quick to laugh and quick to cry. I compare Le Week-end to the Before Sunrise pictures and she says that she's seen them all and loves them. Another possible cousin, she suggests, is Michael Haneke's deathbed drama Amour, except that here her breath catches and her eyes start to glisten. She can't bring herself to talk about it. "It's too emotional," she says. "It just kills me."
Her background, too, further complicates the picture. Duncan was raised in the Midlands, by working-class Scottish parents. Her father, who had served in the army, was killed in a car accident when she was 15 years old. As a child she never conceived of a career on the stage, until the doors flew open and showed what was possible.
It strikes me that Le Week-end is not just a lament for the married couple at the centre. It's also, by implication, an elegy for the aspirational baby boomer generation that grew up on Bob Dylan and the French New Wave and believed, for a brief instant, that they might change the world. Duncan came in on the tail-end of that era and she now mourns its passing. Society, she says, is more fractured and hobbled today.
"On a practical level it was so easy for me," she says. "Back then I could get a grant to study. I can't tell you how crucial that was, because my dad died in my teens and we had no money. I was the suburban kid of Scottish parents and the idea of an acting career was so beyond my experience. I didn't even know there were drama schools until a friend told me."
Duncan came to London to study and then played in repertory theatre in Southwold, which she loved because it was such a playful, rumble-tumble apprenticeship. From there she graduated to the Royal Exchange, the National and the RSC. She won an Olivier award for her role in as the Marquise in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and an Evening Standard gong for playing Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Along the way she has portrayed Margaret Thatcher on TV, voiced an android in a Star Wars prequel and became a favoured collaborator of Harold Pinter, working with the playwright on productions of Celebration, The Room and Ashes to Ashes. It has been an unusual life, a good life, and she has nothing to complain about. She is now 62 and reckons she will keep going as long as people will have her, or up until she drops, whichever comes first.
So the film has it wrong: love doesn't fade? Duncan gives it some thought. "When you're starting out, you can't wait for it to be your turn and you don't know what the fuck you're doing. The excitement of stepping onto a stage, there's nothing quite like it. Now every job I take is freighted with responsibility. You know that you can fail and that it's happened before and that life is short. So I love it as much but I don't need it as much. If someone said I had enough money and I could take six months off, I would run in an instant."
Where would she go? "Well, I'd get an old person's railcard," she laughs. "And actually I do keep thinking about it. I keep thinking of the names of the stations, the mystery of those faraway places. Because I never did it when I was young. I never did the Europe thing, I went to work instead." She shakes her head. "My son did it. He got a Eurorail card a couple of years ago and I was so envious. He just looked at me and said, 'Well, why don't you do it?'"
I think her son has a point. Le Week-end rolls in to remind us that dreams run aground and what's happening now is all that matters. "Yes OK, but I don't want to die," Duncan splutters. "I don't know, maybe I'd go to Europe or maybe South America." He eyes gleam. "Unless I went completely mad and went to India." I hope that she does it; I hope she takes the plunge. I'd also suggest that she gives Paris a miss.
Le Week-end opens on October 11.
0 comments:
Post a Comment