The life of the stand-up is a balance, often precarious, between those stage moments when things seem to be going just right, and the ones which look like they're about to go very wrong. The hero of Tom Shkolnik's debut feature The Comedian, Ed (Edward Hogg), seems to be making decent progress with his club appearances, but when the chance of a new relationship comes along it puts the previously settled balance of his life right out of kilter.
There's something immediately attractive, almost provocatively downbeat about Shkolnik's film that announces a director who knows what he wants – and setting the bar towards the fresh, spontaneous and low key doesn't mean setting it low. It's a work placed definitively in contemporary London, a melting pot that's in a way both classless and bisexual, a city of late night buses, quiet afternoons, the occasional evening out with friends, depicting a generation on the edge of its thirties that hasn't quite settled yet. Ed bankrolls his comedy efforts by working at a call centre (with some gentle comedy to be found there), while his best friend and flatmate Elisa (Elisa Lasowski, pictured below right) is a singer, for whom real life also begins at night, when she's a performer with real talent.
But their friendship is almost too close, defined along the lines of brother and sister rather than sexuality, and it's tested when Ed has a chance encounter with Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, pictured below left), an artist with attitude, more confident in himself, who lives alone for now but is open to an involvement with someone else. Ed's predicament is that he can't choose between these two, and doing his best not to hurt either can hurt only himself; a brusquer way to put that is that he's a hopeless prevaricator, who takes refuge in a well-worn melancholy which brings him right back into his solitude. Elisa's no stranger to the blues herself, in more than just the musical sense, but she knows when a decisive step has to be taken.
Shkolnik has announced The Comedian with a mini-manifesto that sets out his filmmaking principles, with more than a hint of Dogma 95 to it. Weeks of rehearsals brought the actors completely into their roles, with the filming process reduced to the minimum possible – only one take shot of each scene, minimum interference with the real world by building sets or anything more than basic lighting; another of the director's devices, "we must not know what will happen next in the story and invent the film day by day" seems straight out of Mike Leigh land, and that director's DNA has certainly left a mark here.
The drawback of this fleuve technique, especially with a story in which the central character is content to have the river of life flow over him, can be longueurs and lack of direction: melancholy can be a dramatically limiting emotion, even when its solitudes are poetic. The best of this approach is epitomised in the film's meandering final scene, a minicab ride, apparently to nowhere – but at least it's not towards tragedy because, as the driver tells Ed, "you know you're going to be all right".
Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun puts his own visual style into this free formlessness, relishing angles and using the edges of his frames more than you normally see: he also knows how to get the most from the film's brief moment of drama, a confrontation that flares up between passengers on a bus. I hope Shkolnik's next film may retain much of the style of The Comedian, but open the doors to just a little more active content. He's a director to watch.
Watch the trailer for The Comedian
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