There’ve been a host of great rom-coms down the years, but good comedies about heartbreak are altogether thinner on the ground. Their ingredients – big laughs and quiet grief – are a tough mix, but when they land, like La La Land, they tend to linger.
Welcome, then, to La La Island. Writer-actors Tim Key and Tom Basden’s three-hander, set on a remote British isle, have delivered a rare blend of unkempt charm, emotional precision and soulful folk music with this feature-length expansion of their own 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.
Key, best known on screen as Alan Partridge’s befuddled Sidekick Simon and as an award-winning stand-up off it, plays Charles, a jovial but lonely lottery winner who has retreated to this remote idyll to mourn his wife and wear out the LPs of his favourite folk duo, McGwyer Mortimer.
Once the ‘it’ couple on the folk music scene, Herb McGwyer (Basden) and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) have long since split up – romantically and musically – but for Charles, their music is both the sound of happier times and the perfect articulation of his sadness.
It’s Indecent Proposal, only with more knitwear and plaintive strumming
In the manner of Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal, only with a lot more knitwear and plaintive strumming, he’s offered them a suitcase of cash in return for a reunion gig on his island. Only, he sold it to them both as a solo gig.
It’s a funny, smart premise that pays off in myriad ways. Director James Griffiths, who oversaw the original short, draws perfectly pitched turns from the small cast. Basden is suitably salty as the lovelorn, rumpled and initially conceited Herb, who discovers the deception first and initially recoils in the face of Charles’s boundary issues and stream of tactless jokes. ‘A cool half million should keep you in guitar strings, you bloody mercenary,’ Charles tells him, jabbing him right where it hurts.
There’s something here in the relationship between art and money – how stacks of cash will test even the most robust principles – but the story really comes alive when Mulligan’s Nell arrives with her amiable American husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen) in tow and forces Herb to finally face his past.
Anyone who’s held a candle to a past love when they’ve long since moved on will pour one out for the salty singer-songwriter, who deals with his heartache in all the worst ways. In folk terms, he’s Dylan, she’s Baez and they’re well into their toxic, post-Newport phase. The songs, written by Basden, give a wistful voice to a love that once burnt brightly.
There’s a whimsical romantic subplot involving Sian Clifford’s local shopkeeper that sugars some of the tougher truths here. But this musical comedy really sings when it’s exploring the vagaries of the human heart.
A bracing, windswept delight.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri May 30.