Film Reviews

Festival

• Rating:
• Director: Annie Griffin.
• Starring: Amelia Bullmore, Billy Carter, Stephen Mangan, Daniela Nardini.
• Details: UK /107 mins (18s).

Set during the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, Annie Griffin's (The Book Group) tale interweaves the booze and sex-fuelled lives of a number of festival hopefuls. Conor (Carter) is an Irish stand-up on his ninth visit to Edinburgh who clumsily seduces BBC reporter Joan (Nardini) in the hope of influencing her vote on the festival jury; fellow juror and famous English comic Sean (Mangan) philanders his way through proceedings; Micheline (Bullmore) tries desperately to get someone to take notice of her one-woman show about William Wordsworth's long-suffering sister. Trying to make a comedy about comedy is a fraught business, and Griffin's script simply isn't funny enough to generate the kind of laughs it should. All the characters are cliches and stereotypes: the Irish are boozers, the men are philanderers, the women are slaves to their hormones. It gets worse, however, when Griffin addresses subjects like alcoholism, post-natal depression and paedophile priests, all of which sit uneasily among the more light-hearted material. With too many story-lines elbowing one another out of the way in a bid for time and space, none of the actors get enough time to stamp any authority on their roles, with the result that the entire film comes on like a series of badly-edited skits.

Review by Declan Burke