Film Reviews

Goldfish Memory

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Aishling O'Neill
• Details: Ire / 87 mins / (15PG).

It's not been a bad couple of weeks for home-grown efforts. First up we had Intermission and now there's the equally brash Goldfish Memory. This is a movie which sometimes seems too concerned with basking in its own self awareness, but still has enough oomph to make it an entertaining diversion.
Closely related to Intermission in terms of structure, Goldfish Memory follows several intersecting characters in a funky Dublin in which men like the loudly agreeable Red (a well cast, boisterous Keith McErlean) who lives on a houseboat. A chap whose 'gaydadar' is so honed that it demands its own postal address, he settles on the straight acting but obviously gay David (Peter Gaynor) as his next conquest. Of course, Red's instincts are correct and it's not long before David's girlfriend, Rosie (Lise Hearns) is in a fug. Meanwhile, a late thirties college lecturer and legendary sexual predator is making his way through his class in terms of bed partners. A recent conquest Clara (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) is disgusted when she's discarded in favour of another student, Isolde (Fiona Glascott) and experiments with a lesbian journalist called Angie (Flora Montgomery). Funnily enough, she just happens to be Red's best mate.
A film with more overlaps than a Grand Prix race, Goldfish Memory often appears to be more interested in oh-so-clever narrative conveniences than doing anything new with the relationship-based befuddlings of its eager young cast. It skirts around its blatant sexuality a little repetitively at times, threatening to be regarded as little more than a curiosity but Gill's script eventually finds its feet. Moving confidentially in the arena of relationships, it spins out an entertaining diversion of short stories. You might not remember an awful lot about it the next week but Goldfish Memory does enough to make it worthy of your attentions. Pretty good score, too.

Review by Garreth Murphy