When Brendan Met Trudy

Cinephile fantasies come up against the altogether more unpredictable yearnings of real life in Roddy Doyle's first original screenplay. When solitary celluloid dreamer and Dublin teacher Brendan (McDonald) falls for the street-level life force of Trudy (Montgomery), he finds himself rapidly embroiled in an escalating series of comic misadventures, engineered with nods to numerous movies. Briefly suspecting her of city-wide serial castrations, he uncovers a spirit of personal rebellion, propelling him off the sofa. The set-up is clearly stock, but there's an easy-going vitality to the playing and pacing, while the relative predictability of the centre allows the eye to drift towards the edges, where some of the more interesting business is unfolding. There's a strain of gentle satire on nouveau Ireland. Indeed, some Airplane!-style spoofing around is laugh out loud stuff - stay with the end credits for amusing updates on the characters' afterlives. But the picture works most intriguingly as an unintentional elegy to the passing of repertory cinema, and with it any real notion of a shared filmic history.