Directed by Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant. Starring Christian Cooke, Felicity Jones, Tom Hughes, Matthew Goode, Jack Doolan, Emily Watson, Ricky Gervais, Ralph Fiennes 15A cert, gen release, 95 min
IF YOU were searching for a cheap, lazy phrase to sum up the appeal of The Office, you might happen upon something like "sitcom vérité". In that untouchable series, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant took many of the genre's cliches – most notably a deluded Mainwaring- Fawlty – and fashioned something surprisingly fleshy out of them.
Cemetery Junction, the first feature written and directed by the duo, has charm in abundance. Set in a version of Reading during the 1970s, the film veers, as the boys' work often does, between irresistible mawkishness, rough-hewn romanticism and eye-watering comedy of embarrassment. Unfortunately, unlike The Office, none of it seems to take place in the real world. Welcome to Nostalgialand-on-Thames.
Gervais has mentioned Saturday Night Feveras an influence, but the film feels closer in tone and content to John Schlesinger's Billy Liar. The hero of the piece is a bright, modestly ambitious young man named Freddie (Christian Cooke). As the film begins, he has just secured a position selling insurance for a firm run by the absurdly sleazy Mr Kendrick (Ralph Fiennes). Over the next few weeks, he romances the old creep's daughter, squabbles with his parents and, scorned by his lazier mates, plots an escape to the big city.
As ever, Gervais and Merchant draw out fine performances from largely unknown actors. Jack Doolan is particularly good as Freddie’s least socially adept pal and Felicity Jones breathes some life into the stock part of The Boss’s Daughter.
Come to think of it, Cemetery Junction, decked out with detritus left over from a recording of I Love 1973, is jammed to bursting point with stock characters and stock situations. Fiennes is the complacent middle-class bore, Emily Watson the underappreciated suburban housewife. Sadly, this modestly witty film, despite the best efforts of its cast, fails to put much flesh on the bones of those ambulatory cliches.
The scenes featuring Freddie’s working-class family are, however, an unqualified triumph. Anne Reid is superhumanly sour as his granny, Julia Davis believable weary as Mum, and one R Gervais steals his own film as the lad’s deluded, mildly racist dad.
Ricky would, one assumes, have mixed feelings upon hearing there’s the making of a good TV series there. A sort of sitcom vérité, perhaps.
