Film It’s an all too familiar set up. A group of friends meeting in a café setting to talk about their lives as they roll on in the background. American TV has made a hundred sitcoms which tell this same story over and over. Anyone trying to make something which tosses the ingredients around again is going to work very hard to produce a fresh reciepe. For some reason ‘Late Night Shopping’ works on all levels and for once it’s a British film firmly in the European mode.
The variations in the formulae are as follows. The café is open twenty-four hours. The friends meet there before, during and after work. They have four different jobs, but the film is about them, not their place of works. The writer admits that Kevin Smith’s ‘Clerks’ has done the minutae of that far to well to copy. So we have Vince (James Lance) the inveterate womanizer who works packing shelves in a supermarket; Sean (Luke De Woolfson) the would-be romantic, hospital orderly, can’t work out if his girlfriend is still living in his flat; Jody (Kate Ashfield), the talker and listener who has the quirky job of making printed circuit boards on a production line; a Lenny (Enzo Cilenti), the put-upon, who works for directory enquiries and suffers from porno-reactions.
The dialogue, from writer Jack Loathian is superb. These are entirely different people, but at no point do we feel as though someone is saying lines which could have been written for any of them. It is at the root of the characters and tell us everything we’d need to know. But everyone gets to be a human being here; even secondary characters are satisfyingly full. Later in the film, two ancillary characters share a moment over a guy and it’s so real, it hints at a film in which they are the main characters which has led up to their moment (and we’re sorry we didn’t get to see that film as well).
The chemistry between the actors is staggering considering the short shooting schedule, and I'm sure this is partly a tribute to Saul Metzstein's direction. James Lance (‘Rescue Me’, ‘The Book Group’, ‘Teachers’) in particular uses his opportunity play outside usual supporting TV roles and offers well rounded portrayal. Kate Ashfield works very hard with the one slightly underwritten role (of the four friends she lack a complete story of her own) and it’s a credit to her that we don’t notice that she doesn’t do much more than sit around talking to the other characters.
In some ways the fifth main character here is the camera. Brian Tufano also shot ‘Trainspotting’ all those years ago and the virtuosity he displayed there returns here, making the rather limited budget (£1.5 million) seem ten times as big. The characters are dwarfed by the city. Whenever in shot, they appear at the edges of the frame or else at the end of a long tracking shot by way of introduction. This has the effect of making even the small sets feel bigger. The exteriors for the piece were shot in Glasgow and London. If you know those cities that can be a bit disorientating, but the reasoning is sound – this isn’t supposed to be any one city, it could be anywhere, as most places are slowly losing their regional individuality.
Almost spat out just as distributor FilmFour lost its fight to exist, this deserved a much wider viewing. It’s been made with loving care with a single aim to entertain and its one those occasions when you wish you could turn back time throw some money at a decent ad campaign so that no one will have to read this review to get the glint of recognition. All I can do is urge to buy the budget DVD which has just recently been released.
