Although it's being marketed as this year's romantic Britcom hit, David Kane's first feature is a rather sterile game of sexual pass-the-parcel among twentysomethings in NW1.
The script's veneer of wry wit is as thin as the central sextet's patina of trashy bohemianism, and Camden Town serves as both a suitably tacky backdrop for their couplings and a metaphor for their hermetic social lives. Apparently, these unlovely characters have sex only with people with whom they share a previous connection and a postcode. Clearly, they should get out more. The marriage of tattoo artist Danny (Douglas Henshall) and kooky-frock designer Hannah (Catherine McCor-mack) lasts just 35 minutes, before her adultery is exposed. She falls into the arms of Dougray Scott's would-be artist and still-is seducer Cameron. Danny, meanwhile, weeps on the shoulder of Kathy Burke's accommodating Marey, who is a pub singer as well as a cleaner at Heathrow, which allows her entry to this select circle. Meanwhile
Cameron's nerdy flatmate Liam (Ian Hart) is tangling with Sophie (Jennifer Ehle), a dreadlocked single mum whose Camden credentials are severely tarnished by a haughty manner and a Roedean education. Soon Cameron meets Marey and Danny meets Sophie, and so on and so forth, over three years, until the unsatisfying denouement.
Although he makes some good jokes along the way and holds the sense of ensemble performance together, Kane seems ambivalent towards his characters. Rather than judge or romanticise their frantic search for affection, he is a clinical and occasionally cynical observer. He assembles a fine crop of young British actors, then confines them to stereo-types. Henshall is the exasperated Glaswegian, Ehle the egregious snob, and Burke the fag-smoking "fat bird" we all thought she had finally left behind. Kane also believes in perpetuation rather than progress: Ehle's character gets a second unwanted pregnancy, Scott's Cameron carries on philandering, and the losers - Marey and Liam - are left alone.
This may represent the Nineties Britpack version of the formulaic and self-referential American Brat Pack ensemble movies that John Hughes made in the Eighties. Certainly, Kane pays coy visual tribute to both The Full Monty and Four Weddings and a Funeral on screen. I hoped to like this film and I laughed along to a good chunk of it, but way before the end I wanted to punch every single person on the screen. "It takes two to have crap sex," according to Ian Hart's Liverpudlian Liam. In this case, it takes six.
Back to This Year's Love Article Index