Available to stream: “Weekend”

The collapse of sexual taboos has caused some trouble for love, or at least for love stories. That sex often precedes emotional intimacy — or proceeds without it — is a fact of life that movies, with their deep and longstanding investment in romance, especially have a hard time dealing with. Contemporary sexual mores tend to be explored either with grim, punitive realism (as in Steve McQueen’s Shame), or with cute and careful wishful thinking.

Comedies like No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits strain to adapt the ethics of the modern bedroom to tidy and traditional marriage plots (though not always with benefit of clergy). What starts as zipless lust winds up in a longing for commitment. The desires of the flesh rarely spare the heart.

You can’t really fault Hollywood, an empire built on fantasies of heterosexual happiness, for simplifying such complex matters. But there is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat.

Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film. In its matter-of-fact, tightly focused observation of two young men who find their one-night stand growing into something more serious, the movie ranges over vast, often neglected regions of 21st-century life. It is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era, and also about the enduring mystery of sexual attraction and its consequences.

Shot in a little more than two weeks and taking place over a little more than two days, Weekend is also, even primarily, about the leisure-time activities of ordinary British young people, who go to clubs and children’s birthday parties, settle in to marriage or seek out casual sex, and unwind after work with beer, hashish and takeout curries.

Haigh films these activities in the ground-level, hand-held style that has become the international signature of movies by and about restless youth. The audience does not hear music unless the people on screen hear it too, and the overall look and sound display a studious lack of polish. The dialogue feels improvised; the editing is a mix of abrupt cuts and extended takes; and the themes emerge slowly, in keeping with the natural diffidence of the characters.

Or one of them, anyway. Russell (Tom Cullen), who works as a lifeguard at a public pool, lives in a way that disproves any easy, either-or distinction between being in or out of the closet. In the early scenes, which show him hanging out with a mostly straight, mostly paired-off group of friends (including his best pal from childhood), he seems comfortable with himself, but also circumspect. Later, at a gay club, his cruising has a similarly low-key, slightly abashed aspect.

The next morning he wakes up with Glen (Chris New), who is more outspoken and outgoing, full of jokes, opinions and ideas that both unsettle and intrigue his new acquaintance. As they sip coffee in bed, Glen pulls out a tape recorder and interviews Russell about the previous night’s encounter, which the viewer has not seen.

The recitation of physical acts creates both immediacy and distance — it can be more embarrassing to talk about some things than to do them — which is part of Glen’s intention. He explains to Russell that the taped conversation is part of an art project intended to explore the gap that opens up, when sex comes into play, between who someone really is and who he wants to be.

The differences between Glen and Russell form the dramatic backbone of Weekend. It is not just that they disagree about gay marriage, or that Glen is more politically assertive than Russell, who dislikes drawing attention to himself and resists linking his sexuality to a public cause. Their arguments — affectionate but intense — reflect contrasting personalities, and the friction between them is what makes them, potentially, such an interesting couple. Each one, without quite saying so, is grappling with basic questions about love and identity. What can I mean to another person? Whom do I want to be with? Who do I want to be?

A less brave, less honest movie would hasten to provide answers, assuming that the lovers require promises and that the audience needs reassurance. But Weekend, which is about the risks and pleasures of opening up emotionally in the presence of another, remains true to the unsettled, open-ended nature of the experience it documents. And for exactly this reason — because Haigh avoids the easy payoff of either a happy or a tragic ending — it is one of the most satisfying love stories you are likely to see on your TV set or computer screen this year.