It’s Valentines Day at Dublin Airport and Alice (Mad Men’s Jessica Paré) is on standby for a flight home to New York. Then she meets Alan (Brian Gleeson) at the tourist desk at which he now works. They had a fling eight years previously in the USA. They even toyed with marriage and Alan could have done with a Green Card. But the fling came to nothing.
They are still unsettled and unsure of what they are at, even if they pretend they have made their own lives since. In that spirit, Alan persuades his colleague and confidante, Beatrice (Francesca Cherruault) to attend a romantic dinner that evening. He wants Alice to believe that he and Beatrice love each other madly, and thus lure Alice back from her new boyfriend.
Thus we end up with three young people in a restaurant that is otherwise occupied by couples on their intimate night out. Alan later invites Alice back to the family home where his divorced dad (Stanley Townsend) sits around in a dressing gown playing poker and drinking cans of Harp with his mates. As plot sideshow, this goes nowhere, although there may well be people who like the feeble attempts at The Commitments-style humour.
In terms of social life and professional smartness, Dublin is surely a reasonably confident place now. However, the capital is represented as a social failure of a town in Pierce Ryan’s screenplay, smacking once again somewhat of Roddy Doyle, circa 1988. This could be a much better film if the screenplay was more considered, and less laboured.
Paddy Kehoe
