The HBO dramedy may be over, but at least we’ll always have Weekend.
Tom Cullen and Chris New in Weekend
IFC Films
After a two-season run, HBO canceled Looking, its San Francisco Bay Area-set dramedy about a trio of gay men and their various friends and lovers. The network has, however, promised fans that Patrick (Jonathan Groff), Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez), Dom (Murray Bartlett), and company will be back for one last special that, according to cast member Russell Tovey (who plays Kevin Matheson, Patrick's boss turned boyfriend), will be directed by the show's executive producer Andrew Haigh.
But, if you can't wait, Haigh directed and wrote a film you can watch right now on Netflix that has the same painful honesty, emotional delicacy, and regular loveliness of the series at its best. Weekend is Looking's melancholy and slightly older spiritual British sibling, without the occasional intentionally excruciating scene that the latter sometimes employed — the kind that could have you watching through the gaps between your fingers like it was a horror movie. And though Weekend retains some prickliness, it's prickliness of a less aggressive sort, showcasing the things people do to push others away when they're feeling vulnerable.
The 2011 movie is a romance, both sweet and bitter, between a pair of men who meet at a club on Friday and who end up spending, on and off, the next two days together. Like Looking, Weekend is aware of the burdens of representation it bears as a story about contemporary gay characters, though it's far from a lecture. Its tentative lovers, Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), are sharply believable people as well as types — Russell's semi-closeted and not always comfortable with his identity, and Glen's out and confrontational about it, the kind of guy who'd have his birthday party at a mostly straight bar in order to get in a fight.
IFC Films
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