Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan in Le Week-End (Music Box Films)

After 30 years of marriage, Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) are expecting a comfortable, satisfied existence, but life hasn’t delivered. Nick’s career as a philosophy professor has abruptly ended (he was forced to take early retirement after making a racially insensitive remark to a student), and though the couple’s children are now grown, one son is a layabout who’s still financially dependent on his parents. A trip to Paris—where they went on their honeymoon—seems like the ideal way to rekindle their passion, but despite a hotel room with the requisite view of the Eiffel Tower, there’s no tinge of dreamy romance hovering over this relationship.

Light on plot, the film has an all-too-real atmosphere to it. Viewers will feel as though they’re truly trailing after a bickering middle-aged couple as they have the same argument you know they’ve suffered through endless times before (how to deal with the not-so-empty nest, and so on). The two meander through the requisite tourist attractions until they come across Morgan, an old writer friend of Nick’s (Jeff Goldblum, essentially playing himself in an indulgently enjoyable performance). Nick and Meg agree to attend a party thrown by Morgan, who recently divorced his wife of many years to marry a much younger French woman, an event that threatens to further derail their already rocky relationship.

Though there are serious problems with the marriage, the film is surprisingly upbeat. It’s rare that a work about a marriage on the rocks can be described as both heart-wrenching and joyfully exuberant, but Le Week-End somehow succeeds on both fronts. Duncan can be truly scathing at times, tossing out one backhanded compliment after another and icily rebuffing her husband’s clumsy but well-meaning stabs at reestablishing intimacy, and put-upon Broadbent’s attempts at pretending—to himself, to his wife—that his life isn’t a disappointment give him a palpable air of discomfort. Yet there are moments of true pleasure for the two. Over dinner one night, Meg suggests that the two leave a restaurant before the expensive bill arrives, but the seemingly dire scene is followed by a riotously funny, middle-aged version of a dine-and-dash, where Duncan is in her element.

The visuals are appropriately gorgeous, of course, but it’s the rich inner lives of the protagonists that propel this film. While we aren’t privy to all the details—What’s behind Nick’s allusion to the man Meg supposedly seduced? Why was Nick so distant when the couple’s two sons were young?—there’s enough thrown out that we get a sense of the possible aftermath of a long marriage, warts and all.

The shaky, handheld camera and the informality of the script give the film an intimate, almost documentary-like feel, reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, but where Husbands was a starkly unpleasant, almost voyeuristic look at disintegrating relationships, Le Week-End is imbued with an optimism that doesn’t let up, despite witty barbs, eye rolls, and accusations of infidelity. There’s a real tenderness between the protagonists, for all their flaws—and there are many. This may not be a loud and definite affirmation of the marital institution, but it certainly provides enough hope that for these two, the end isn’t yet in sight.