Roger Michell’s LE WEEK-END is being promoted as a film focusing on the thirty year marriage of two sixty-somethings, but it is really much more than that. It is an exploration of the many layers that comprise the lives of those of us who are on the other side of sixty. In fact, to accurately reduce this film to a synopsis of plot and character is impossible, so nuanced is it. I suspect that LE WEEK-END offers a kind of Rorschach test, in which one’s answer to–what’s this film about?–depends on just where you are in dealing with the oh-my-god-how-did-I-get-to-be-this-age scenario.

While LE WEEK-END foregrounds the issue of marriage–this weekend in Paris is the celebration of Nick and Meg’s thirtieth wedding anniversary–for me, the film is about so much more than their marriage, a marriage or even any marriage. I saw the signal question the three main characters of LE WEEK-END were asking as some variation of “what’s next?” which includes, as it must, the secondary question, “is there a next even possible?” And then the mega question which hovers over all–”what happened to who and what I thought I’d be?”

Behind these questions for all of us is the human urge to create a meaningful life. It’s the same urge that propelled us in our twenties, except now there are limits imposed. Some are real, some imagined, some imposed by others, some by our own view of aging–but they all have to be acknowledged, sorted out if you will, in order that we can continue to satisfy that existential urge.

The three characters of LE WEEK-END offer three different possiblities. Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), who plays an academic superstar now living in Paris, has dealt with it by starting over again: new wife, new family, new life. Except he knows that this fresh start will one day be stale–and the question then will be, can he pull it off again? Nick (Jim Broadbent) is a mild-mannered, somewhat sheepish professor of philosophy at a polytechnic in Northern England. This is definitely not where he thought he’d be headed in the days when he and Morgan were grad students in Cambridge. Even more, he has just been fired, which makes the question of what he’ll do next more pressing. Meg (Lindsay Duncan) is a teacher who fairly pulsates with exasperation at her slower, stolid husband, even as she loves and wants him–and wants more for them than their current life.

Even as I write this I’m aware how the Rorschach effect is coloring my own descriptions. I was watching the film unfold through Meg’s eyes; so that exasperation–was it all hers, or was some of it mine? Even while I was watching it, I wondered how a man would view Meg and Nick; who would he empathize with.

I found out quite quickly when I read Kenneth Turan’s review of LE WEEK-END in the LA Times. “Le Week-End” is a sour and misanthropic film masquerading as an honest and sensitive romance. A painful and unremittingly bleak look at a difficult marriage, it wants us to sit through a range of domestic horrors without offering much of anything as a reward.

Had Turan and I seen the same film? At first I was appalled at the vituperative intensity of his antipathy. Then I was amused. This was the Rorschach effect at work on Turan. I don’t know what his domestic situation is but I’ll bet on this: he is, for whatever reason, heavily invested in a happily-ever-after rendition of married life.

Meg and Nick’s marriage wasn’t difficult; it was incredibly realistic. I don’t know what the domestic horrors Turan was referring to are–really, I can’t think of one–but I can tell you that the reward of LE WEEK-END for me was the joy of seeing sixty-somethings portrayed on the screen as fully rounded people, operating in a world with the same consciousness they had at twenty layered over by the experience of their next forty years. There wasn’t a false note in this film and as for that Rorschach effect–how rare these days to see a movie that not only makes one think, but promotes self-knowledge.

Here’s the trailer. Watch  it. Then go see LE WEEK-END and let the Rorschach effect work on you.