What if this love ends? How will each remember the other in years to come when they’re busy having children with other people? “Do you ever think about that?” Mattie asks a taciturn James. Streamy Awards Announces Nominees for Celebration of Online Video Contentįor the first portion of the film, this back-and-forth between bullshitting and bickering is light and comical, the natural vicissitudes of a dense concentration of “time together.” First, Mattie visits James in Chicago for the weekend, then he comes to New York, and in each episode there is a slow disintegration from horny giddiness to emotional caution and insecurity about the future.

At their most intimate - eating together, practicing trust falls, and engaging in frank conversations about their past love-lives or whether either has said “I love you” and not fully meant it - there is always an undercurrent of uncertainty, as if the emotional nakedness that one demands of the other requires a minute-to-minute anticipation of each person’s needs. But, as Mattie at one point quips, “A couple of what?” Even in their days of romance, small squabbles and controlling tendencies inevitably arise.

Shot in an unflatteringly fleshy digital video, “Nights and Weekends” is often uncomfortably close, an inquest into (or even postmortem of) the life of a couple. In between, the film often pauses to ponder the many levels of these characters’ self-exposure: showering, sitting on the can, dressing and undressing themselves and each other, critically scrutinizing themselves in mirrors and photographs.

At the film’s outset, while in a long-distance relationship, James and Mattie enter the former’s Chicago apartment and promptly make love on the floor toward the end of the film, after a year and an off-screen break-up, they fleetingly try something similar in a hotel in New York. Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig, the costars, cowriters, and codirectors of “ Nights and Weekends,” spend a good part of their film naked.

Echoes in the Darkness by Jane Godman