Unbelievable. Jonathan Romney falls for a good British romantic comedy
This week, don't be surprised to learn that the Barbary apes have deserted the Rock of Gibraltar or that the ravens have left the Tower of London. Something equally momentous has occurred -- someone has actually made a good British romantic comedy. I never thought I'd like a film hailed by Time Out as a "bright new Britpic to steal your heart". But Britpic, schmitpic -- This Year's Love is a smart piece of work in any genre.
If the hideous poster campaign (lipstick-smeared fag-sucking frog) is meant to pitch the film as a jolly gals-and-geezers frolic, this debut feature by writer-director David Kane is considerably cannier than that suggests. In the abstract, the project smacks of contrived modishness -- set in Camden Town, starring the hippest crop of British acting talent (this year's luvvies), and spiked with acerbically snotty one-liners. But This Year's Love shatters the feelgood template early on, and despite being consistently witty, registers more as a complex urban drama than as the amorous fluff that has become British's screen staple.
At first, we think we're in familiar territory, as Kane plays crafty lip-service to Four Weddings And A Funeral, with a couple leaping out of bed and dashing to their own nuptials. But things soon get tough. Tattoo artist Danny (Douglas Henshall) and clothes designer Hannah (Catherine McCormack) are married for less than an hour before a sour friend (a pithy cameo from Bronagh Gallagher) puts a spanner in the works. Hannah takes up with bar lizard Cameron (Dougray Scott), while Danny meets airport cleaner and aspiring singer Marey (Kathy Burke) who, in a cheeky touch, is first seen eating crisps out of a packet emblazoned with a Full Monty marketing tie-in.
So the circle starts spinning, interrupted occasionally by jumps of one year. Also entering the fray are lesbian Alice (Emily Woof), diffident comics nerd Liam (Ian Hart) and Sophie (Jennifer Ehle), a dreadlocked single mother whose radical-chic lifestyle disguises a pampered posh-girl past. The less you know about the permutations the better, but This Year's Love is impressive on several counts, especially for what it avoids.
Almost unthinkably for this sort of story, it shuns the buddy factor. Usually, when a gaggle of hip urbanites bounce off each other, they're all best friends, whose rifts are bound to be mended by shared memories and hugs. This lot don't all huddle together in a hermetic world. The close friends and confidants drop promptly out of the picture, while it's the outsiders, the complete and unsuitable strangers, who really affect each other's lives. And that makes for much riskier narrative stakes.
Kane isn't concerned to leave us glowing with happy closure. The story nudges us to expect conventional payoffs -- the punishment and redemption of creeps, reward for the lovable. But whenever we're about to get facile, Kane whisks away the carpet sending his characters shuttling off in different directions. Even at the end, we know everything is still up for grabs.
The Camden setting might seem like touristic opportunism. British cinema this year does seem to be ruled by the laws of cultural real estate -- we'll soon be getting the Four Weddings follow-up Notting Hill, and how long then before someone makes Straight Out of Hoxton? But Camden Lock, for all its plastic counter-culture tackiness, is one of those London locations where people collide in a faux-carnival setting, so the setting is at least a plausible narrative excuse for getting these people together. And better these confused sideways-mobile low-lifers than the bogus Soho slicksters we usually get -- no Sliding Doors PR here. Three of the characters are Scottish, one Liverpudlian, all understandably having second thoughts about the Smoke. This Year's Love revels in London instead of just talking it up for the export trade.
None of a very impressive cast go out of their way to make us love them, even Henshall's endearing bluff loser. And only occasionally does the odd character seem perilously close to parody, like Scott's loutish lover-man and talentless conceptual painter. Kathy Burke is commanding as ever, and Ian Hart is outstanding, gradually revealing unsuspected scars. The smartest casting, though, is Jennifer Ehle -- known until now as a diva of TV heritage drama, here slouching under a mass of blonde dreadlocks and wrapping her cut-glass vowels round an altogether grungier form of angst than she's tackled before.
There's a touch of the usual British disease -- a cartload of this year's pop, indiscriminately plastered over the soundtrack. That said, This Year's Love gives a second lease of life to a taut ballad called Shine by singer David Grey, which Burke sings with poignant ordinariness at the close.
Ordinary, in fact, is a good word for this film, and that's a compliment. Kane writes and, with photographer Robert Alaxraki, shoots a London that for once you recognise. It may not be anywhere you'd want to live, let alone date in, but it feels real, and it's not short of surprises.
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