23 de abr. de 2012

Weekend


Dois personagens gays que acabam de se conhecer, passam o fim de semana entre momentos de sexo, drogas e muitos diálogos. Assim como os fascinantes "Antes do Amanhecer" e "Antes do Pôr-do-Sol", é através dos diálogos interessantes e fluidos que o filme "Weekend" consegue revelar tanto dos seus personagens e de forma tão natural. Colabora que os dois atores estejam ótimos, e os temas abordados sejam tão atuais, como a forma como os gays são aceitos na sociedade, como os gays se aceitam ou como lidam com relacionamentos.

Em determinado momento do filme, um dos personagens apresenta uma tese de que o momento em que duas pessoas estão se conhecendo é um momento em que elas não são quem elas realmente são (pois estão querendo impressionar o outro) nem quem elas gostariam de ser, mas algo entre esses dois estágios. É nesse universo complexo em que o filme mergulha, em dois personagens buscando esse equilíbrio entre ser ou parecer, seja para o outro ou seja até mesmo para a sociedade ou para os amigos e familiares. E no decorrer desses diálogos, iremos pouco a pouco descobrir essas essências e aparências, não só dos personagens, mas de todos nós. 

Nota: A crítica do New York Times faz um interessante panorama do cinema gay nos últimos anos.

Minha Cotação: * * * * 1/2


CRÍTICA | EPÍLOGOS E EPÍGRAFES
WEEKEND [Andrew Haigh]

http://epilogosepigrafes.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/041-weekend-andrew-haigh/


Da troca de olhares em uma boate numa sexta-feira à noite, os dois passam a uma tórrida paixão de fim-de-semana, com o destino decretando desde o início de que o relacionamento durará apenas 48 horas. Durante os dois dias, a relação se desenvolve com exemplar naturalidade – marca que o diretorAndrew Haigh imprime durante todo o longa-metragem. O casal passa o tempo envolto em conversas, passeios pela cidade e, é claro, fazendo bastante sexo. A conversa flui incrivelmente bem e a afinidade é daquelas que poucas vezes você encontra em alguém pela vida. A descrição cabe ao mais apaixonado dos casais que o cinema já mostrou, mas o diferencial de WEEKEND atende pelo fato de que os dois personagens enamorados são homens. Haigh trata o assunto com muita naturalidade, mostrando um viés que até pouco tempo era pouco comum em filmes com temática homossexual, onde o componente sexual é era o centro e não somente mais um em meio à condição básica do relacionamento. Tom Cullen e Chris New, intérpretes de Russel e Glen, compõem com extrema sensibilidade e intensidade os protagonistas, e se juntam ao trabalho do diretor na tentativa de negar a responsabilidade de criar algo para quebrar paradigmas, nem mesmo ser pedante sobre um assunto no mínimo difícil de ser discutido. Essa aposta faz o filme crescer e a honestidade com que Haigh trata o material que tem em mãos certamente fará muita gente repensar acerca das muitas possibilidades de relacionamento que a vida faz surgir diante de nossos olhos.

Cotação: ●●●●


CRÍTICA | NEW YORK TIMES
Romance and Reflection, Hand in Hand
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/movies/andrew-haighs-weekend-looks-at-a-gay-couple.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all




Tom Cullen, far left, as Russell, and Chris New as Glen, getting to know each other in “Weekend,” written and directed by Andrew Haigh.

By DENNIS LIM
Published: September 22, 2011

MOST romantic movies are so determined to chart the course of a love story — how boy meets girl leads to happily or unhappily ever after — that they miss the intensity and import of beginnings. But the new British film “Weekend,” like its closest American predecessor “Before Sunrise,” lingers on the initial sparks of an erotic and emotional connection. As a one-night stand turns into something more, the film explores the notion that to meet someone new, not least a potential partner, is also to rethink who you are, an invitation to shape and refine the self you wish to project. A story about falling in love that is also a tale of identity and self-definition, it is perhaps all the more resonant for taking place between two gay men.

The rules of the marketplace dictate that “Weekend,” the breakout hit of this year’s South by Southwest Festival and now playing in New York, be considered a “gay film,” a designation that generally refers to the sexuality of a film’s maker, subject matter and target demographic. “Weekend,” which details the wary push-pull and palpable chemistry between Russell (Tom Cullen), a shy working-class lifeguard, and Glen (Chris New), a brash aspiring artist, fits the label to a T while making it seem inadequate.

“I wanted gay people to feel that it reflected something they understood, but I didn’t make it just for gay people,” the film’s writer and director, Andrew Haigh (rhymes with vague), said during an interview at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan in the summer. In town for the gay film festival NewFest, he noted that “Weekend” was partly a reaction to what he saw as the shortcomings of gay cinema. “I was always frustrated, and angry sometimes, about the stories that people were telling, which were either coming-out stories or frothy, sexy comedies which weren’t funny or sexy.”

If Mr. Haigh’s modest micro-indie somehow feels fresh — writing about a festival screening of the film, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it a “bracing, present-tense exploration of sex, intimacy and love” — it may be because the genre of the gay romance has never really had the chance to mature. For better and worse, straight screen romances have always reflected the gender and sexual attitudes of their times. Gay love stories were for much of the last century nonexistent or synonymous with tragedies of the closet.

In his playful 1972 book “Screening the Sexes,” one of the first studies of homosexuality in the movies, the critic Parker Tyler drew up a taxonomy of gay and crypto-gay characters and themes, identifying types like “the chameleon” and “the funny fellow,” and breaking them down into even more flavorsome subcategories (“hustling cupids,” “uncle-aunties,” “lady scarfaces”). Love never comes into it. Post-Stonewall ideas about gay representation are best summed up in Vito Russo’s influential book “The Celluloid Closet” (1981), a work of criticism as activism that teased apart the coded signals and exposed the insidious vilification that had surrounded screen portrayals of gay people for decades.

As gay liberation took root, the most prominent gay films were sincere romantic dramas like “Making Love” and “Personal Best” (both 1982), which strove to validate same-sex relationships by presenting them in a nonthreatening light, and the films grew even more somber as AIDS entered the picture (“Longtime Companion,” “Philadelphia”). Gay characters now turn up regularly in Hollywood movies, as comic sidekicks or diversity tokens, but usually take center stage only if they are martyrs (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Milk”).

In the indie sphere the brief flowering of the New Queer Cinema of the early ’90s identified a new niche audience. Gay-theme movies, festivals and distributors proliferated, capitalizing on the epiphany that gay films, and in particular romances, could be as formulaic as straight ones. The trend was sufficiently pronounced to earn the nickname “gaysploitation” and be spoofed in a 2001 short film “Jeffrey’s Hollywood Screen Trick.” (The title conflates several emblematic gay rom-coms.)




“Weekend” is the exception that proves the rule: As gay experiences have become more varied, and as the conversation about being gay has evolved, gay films have largely failed to keep up. A wide swath of so-called gay cinema “never represented how I felt about being gay, ever,” Mr. Haigh said. “I haven’t got muscles and I don’t live in West Hollywood.” Often overlooked are the subtle complications that have come with progress. “People are accepting you but perhaps not fully,” he said. “And do you want to be accepted fully?”

Although Mr. Haigh resisted turning his characters into mouthpieces, he said he thought of them as embodying conflicting impulses. Glen, who prides himself on his difference, lashes out at homophobic insults and is sensitive to entrenched biases and perceived slights. Russell is out to his circle of straight friends but remains coy with them, often resorting to half-truths and evasions, a fact of life for many gay people who try to assimilate into straight culture.

“One represents this notion of freedom and struggle and fight against the mainstream, and one represents security and a comfortable life, just wanting to be like everybody else.” Mr. Haigh, 38, said. He acknowledged that he once “ricocheted between the two” but now occupies a middle ground.

The reaction of some gay viewers, Mr. Haigh said, has reminded him that gay films still often assume the obligation of advancing positive images. In post-screening discussions at gay and lesbian festivals some have raised concerns about the recreational drug use in “Weekend”; others asked why he didn’t emphasize that his characters are having safe sex. “I can understand that the community is protective,” Mr. Haigh said. “But if you feel you’re going to be accepted by society, you can’t only be accepted for positive elements.”

Mr. Haigh worked his way up the ranks of British cinema; as an assistant editor he worked with Ridley Scott among others. But he said that he feels a greater affinity with the American scene, and that he especially prizes the naturalistic intimacy in the films of Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani. One British indie that did make an impression was Jamie Thraves’s “Low Down,” a finely observed 2001 film about paralyzing quarter-life anxieties that is arguably a precursor to mumblecore, whose scrappy, D.I.Y. mindset Mr. Haigh adopted.

Mr. Haigh’s first feature, “Greek Pete” (2009), made on a shoestring, starred gay escorts who played versions of themselves within a fictional framework. The documentary elements inspired his approach on “Weekend,” which he filmed mainly in long takes, entrusting his actors, who both have theater backgrounds, with the sustained ebb and flow of scenes that are highly dependent on nuances of dialogue and small gestures.

The drab provincial city in “Weekend” is never named, but it was shot in Nottingham, in many of the same locations as Karel Reisz’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960), a landmark of the British school of kitchen-sink realism. Mr. Haigh acknowledged that the Reisz film was a touchstone — it also spanned a weekend and concerned “characters trying to deal with the social climate of their time,” he said — and Glen is in some ways a modern gay version of Albert Finney’s original angry young man.

For his next film Mr. Haigh is looking to another ’60s classic for inspiration. He hopes to update Agnès Varda’s “Cleo From 5 to 7,” a real-time account of a young woman adrift in Paris as she awaits a medical diagnosis. (Mr. Haigh plans to shoot in Los Angeles with a male lead.) He said he had been getting conflicting career advice: “Some people say, you have to do another film about gay experience, and other people say, whatever you do, don’t do that.” He added: “Whoever my films are about they’ll hopefully still have my sensibility, whatever that is.”

Accordingly, the question of whether “Weekend” is a gay film is probably best answered: yes and no. “The root of the film for me is two characters trying to work out who they are and what they want from life, how they’re going to fit that into the world around them and show the world that they are those people,” Mr. Haigh said. “These issues aren’t just about being gay. They’re about how you define yourself, in public and in private.”


FICHA TÉCNICA
Release Date: 19/3/11
Country of Origin: UK
Director: Andrew Haigh
Cast: Tom Cullen, Chris New, Jonathan Race, Laura Freeman
BBFC Rating: 18

On a Friday night after hanging out with his straight mates, Russell heads out to a nightclub, alone and on the pull. Just before closing time he picks up Glen. Over the next 48 hours, Russell and Glen become inseparable, gradually forming a tight bond that neither of them could have predicted - one that may change their lives forever. Andrew Haigh`s celebrated WEEKEND depicts an unconventional love story with a raw, edifying honesty, making Haigh a refreshing new voice in British cinema.










6 comentários:

  1. Adorei a premissa, realmente fala sobre algo comum a todos os relacionamentos, obrigado pela dica, baixarei brevemente!

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  2. Fabio, gostei muito do seu espaço. Cara, vc faz crítica sim..hehe...mesmo que ache q não. Esse filme vi no MKO para baixar, vou vê se pego para uma conferida, parece mesmo interessante. Vou linkar teu blog no meu para acompanhar seus posts. Parabéns pelo bom gosto. Grande abraço e apareça.

    http://espectadorvoraz.blogspot.com.br/

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    Respostas
    1. Valeu, Celo. Enfim, o importante é falar de cinema, né? Valeu pela visita, pode deixar que irei acompanhar o seu blog e iremos trocando ideias sobre os filmes!!!

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