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| Tookey's Review |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2012 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
ROMANCE
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| Origin: |
UK |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
79 |
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A gloom with no view.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Anyone expecting The Comedian to be a comedy will be disappointed. Anyone hoping for entertainment may lose the will to live.
This BFI-funded loser is the super-depressing tale of Ed (Edward Hogg, pictured). He’s in his early thirties, but emotionally retarded. Though he’s a would-be stand-up on the London comedy circuit, he isn’t funny. He’s not even edgy, whatever that means.
During the day, he has a demeaning job in a call centre. He lives platonically with Elisa (Elisa Lasowski), a beautiful but untalented folk-singer. On a bus, Ed meets a young black man called Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), and their carnal attraction threatens his relationship with Elisa. And that’s it.
Seldom have 79 minutes felt more like seven hours. There’s a long, inconsequential visit to Ed’s family home up north, and an even longer, more inconsequential chat between Ed and a cab driver in London. The plot doesn’t so much end as fizzle out, utterly bereft of ideas and narrative drive.
Israeli-born writer-director Tom Shkolnik clearly believes his characters are fascinating. Audiences won’t. These are deeply boring people – aimless, self-absorbed, self-indulgent.
Towards the end, there is a lethargic discussion of why Sheffield has become a mosaic of wetlands. On this evidence, London is attracting the wettest people on the planet.
Shkolnik boasts in the production notes that he never knew what was going to happen next in the story and invented the film day by day. It certainly looks like it.
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