Late Night Shopping
*
Cinema
Releases - June 22, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 100
minutes. Directed by Saul Metzstein. Written by Jack Lothian. Starring Luke
de Woolfson, James Lance, Kate Ashfield, Enzo Cilenti, Heike
Makatsch.
I bear no resemblance at all to Freddie Prinze
Jr, except that we're both men, and we both have black hair. And yet during
"Down to You", the whispers of a bunch of nearby girls informed me that they
thought I was the guy onscreen. Flash forward one year -- in "Late
Night Shopping" James Lance looks exactly as I do at this point in
time, but not one member of the audience did so much as double-take. There
were only five people in the auditorium, but still, what a
gyp.
As for the movie, well, it's a piece of crap.
A bunch of twentysomething night workers sit around in a café conversing,
and occasionally we cut away to their jobs. The screenwriter, Jack Lothian,
tries to give them hip and witty dialogue; there are those reliable old
conversations about the battle between the sexes, of course, and semantic
discussions about whether the main characters are 'friends' or 'acquaintances'.
It's sad and forced, delivered in embarrassingly stiff and phoney tones.
The basic premise could make for a good actors' piece, but the actual movie
is filled with embarrassing speeches and amateurish acting.
Lance plays Vincent, a slick supermarket flunky
well on his way to sleeping with every woman in London. Luke de Woolfson
plays Sean, a guy whose schedule conflicts with that of his girlfriend so
severely that he's taken to wondering whether she still lives in their apartment.
Enzo Cilenti is Lenny, a geeky phone operator who doesn't say much, and certainly
cannot chat up women, as a former job writing for a porn magazine has left
him scarred by impure thoughts he calls 'porno reactions'. Kate Ashfield
is Jody, a scowling and pretentious young woman who resides in the movie
solely to recite clichés of feminine aggression.
The film's random cuts from the café to
the workplaces take forever to impart information about the characters, and
amount to hardly anything when they do. Then suddenly, at about the
one-and-a-half hour mark, the picture launches itself into some cumbersome
nonsense about Vincent accidentally sleeping with Sean's girlfriend and all
four pals having to go to Cornwall to find missing people and heal
wounds.
Amidst the disastrous structure are eccentricities
that make no sense. Sean works in a hospital as deserted as Vincent's
supermarket; I defy anybody who has ever been in a hospital to claim that
business dies down at night. Sean also recants how he has taken to examining
the forensic evidence of his apartment in an attempt to figure out whether
his girlfriend is still around -- checking the minutiae of soap and bedclothes,
for example. Wouldn't he see her at the weekend, when neither of them are
working? Lenny's car has a radio that cannot be switched off, no matter what.
If the radio cannot be switched off, even by shutting down the car engine,
then how is it that over the course of the movie several people switch it
on? Doesn't it have to be in the off position in order to be switched
on?
"Late Night Shopping" does not follow a formula
or make obvious attempts to please crowds, and I suppose that distinguishes
it from a lot of recent British comedies. The movie at least attempts
to be creative. But it looks and feels drab, is pointless, and does fall
into the common Britflick trap of featuring actors who sound like they're
auditioning for a high school play. A character piece without a single believable
performer can only be called a disaster.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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