Food of Love

Alex (Grant) is a fogeyish assistant bank manager who, in an attempt to stave off the depredations of an increasingly wired world, retreats to the countryside to stage - as he did in the same village a decade before - an am-dram Twelfth Night. With him he takes a trio of rough kids from the acting class he teaches and the cast of the original production, now a collective indictment of the thirty-something treadmill. The Pimm's soaked idyll of memory, however, resembles nothing so much as the urban jungle they've escaped. The natives are just as hostile, and you can't see the rose beds for the satellite dishes. Poliakoff's jaded yuppy schtick has a lineage stretching back to Close My Eyes. However, once the film leaves the sinister metropolis, the writer/director is clearly straying from home ground. The village harridans intent on stymying the play, for instance, are merely crass, head-scarfed stereotypes. Grant and company, though, are hardly better served by the screenplay, which spreads itself too thin in trying to address the concerns of each and every character.