Late Night Shopping (dir. Saul Metzstein, 2000) (review © Jon Horne 2001) from Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide) Saul Metzstein and Jack Lothian's Late Night Shopping is a small-scale ensemble comedy, detailing the lives and loves of a group of nocturnal English expatriates in contemporary Glasgow. Light on action and heavy on dialogue, there are no heists, no hard drug abuse, no murders, and only one (rather handbaggy) fight. Instead the characters drink a lot of coffee whilst worrying and complaining about work, sex, friendship, and not much else. I really wanted to like this film. It's summer after all, blockbuster season, and the last thing I saw was The Mummy Returns - so by way of contrast, I was looking forward to a gentle comedy which wasn't going to pin me to my seat with volume and violence. It is therefore my sad duty to tell you that Late Night Shopping is not a particularly good film. Oh, it's alright, funny in places, and generally a competent piece of work, but there is a spark lacking, in the acting and especially in the writing, which was disappointing. Speaking of the film's development, the film's writer Jack Lothian says: "We had the title Late Night Shopping but no script. FilmFour liked the sound of it, so we had to come up with a story then!" It shows. Lothian and director Saul Metzstein have come up with a script whose anorexic plot rests on strained coincidences, and whose jokes reveal a desperation to find a style of humour which will be comprehensible outside of this country. The film is largely an attempt to sell American slacker 'irony' (specifically using Douglas Coupland's Generation X as inspiration, if not as outright source material) back to the American post-student market, in the guise of something 'quirky' and 'Briddish'. Late Night Shopping concerns four friends - Sean, Vincent, Lenny, and Jody - who aren't really friends but who all work night shifts and drink in the same cafe, talking about... you know... stuff - rather like, well... Friends, and very much like Generation X. The foursome particularly enjoy classifying each other in pop-culture terms - rather like The Faculty or Scream (admittedly without the same smugness, but also without the likelihood of the more irritating characters being brutally slaughtered later on). The names of the characters should tell you straight away that this is an American film which got shot in Glasgow by mistake. The dialogue is American too: Vincent, the sex-obsessed shallow male, doesn't chat a girl up, he "hits on her"; a girl who acts the same way is not called a slag, she is a "tramp"; they even say "huh?" instead of "eh?" - and these are just the examples that I scribbled down in a five-minute burst of annoyance. It was probably this annoyance which led me to fantasise that the actors' speech - slow, heavily-emphasised and generally unnatural - was also designed so as not to alienate the American audience which needed subtitles in order to understand Gregory's Girl. Whatever the reason though, the stagey acting made the jokes a lot less funny. More than once I was reminded of Ben Elton in stand-up mode, overplaying everything in case someone in the audience might miss one of his hard-written one-liners. OK, I'm overdoing it now. Late Night Shopping is not a particularly bad film, any more than it is a particularly good one. Despite the paucity of plot, the characters all get a chance to grow 'as people' during the course of the film, and no one has any qualms about mixing comedy with pathos, and cynicism with sentiment, often within the same scene. Kate Ashfield (Jody) and James Lance (Vincent) are especially effective at portraying the effort it takes to maintain an air of detached shallowness. As for the stagey acting, I was watching a preview show in an empty cinema, so the stilted dialogue might work a lot better in a packed house where everyone is getting the jokes - the gaps giving people time to laugh. No matter what anyone thinks of the writing, this is a beautifully shot film. Photographer Brian Tufano treats the visual side of things in the same advertising-based style as he did with Trainspotting, and with the same warmth as he did with Billy Elliot, giving the characters an elegantly wasted look (watch out for Luke de Woolfson, as Sean, on a million teenage girls' bedroom walls, very soon) and using effects with wit and subtlety (or rather, with a deliberate lack of subtlety. You know what I mean). Similarly Justine Wright, whose slick editing made One Day In September (the documentary about the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics) so problematically attractive, has found a natural home in comedy, sharpening the visual jokes with quick cuts and long stares. There seems to be a point being made in setting the film in Glasgow, and then deliberately removing most of the references to the setting. Of course, everything happens at night, so there are no landmarks to be seen. There are also very few Scots around - two minor characters, to be exact. I must confess, this made me suspicious. Like Richard Curtis's immigrant-free Notting Hill (essentially a bigot-friendly advert for Curtis's house, which happened to be on the market at the time), the filmmakers seem to be presenting us with a Scot-free Glasgow. In fact, the setting works well. Late Night Shopping is about being bored, lonely, and rootless, and about finding friendship and love in unpromising circumstances, so it is natural for the characters to be in a place other than 'home'. Although I found Late Night Shopping disappointing, I wouldn't mind if it was a hit. If the producers make some money out of it, then they may be tempted to have another go - this time with a plot. On the rare occasions when something happens, everyone involved in the film becomes a little more alive and interested, and the enthusiasm is catching. I am looking forward to seeing what this team can come up with next time. So... if you're a fan of American sitcoms, and if you haven't read Generation X or listened to a lot of Beck records, go and see this film. Otherwise, it's not really worth two hours out of your life. - - - Opening around the country, 22.6.01. See it in Nottingham at the Broadway cinema, Broad Street. 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