Art is hard. This is a truth that is pretty much universal, despite what a number of chuds on the internet seem to think. In my experience, if you think your art is good, you’re probably wrong, you arrogant prick. You can probably expand that to ‘work’ in general, rather than just art, but that’d be digressing. I didn’t spend all that time doing artsy shit to not realise that arting is difficult and arting well is harder still. To that end, films about people failing to art tends to have a certain appeal to me. So… is this when I finally write posts about Slaves of New York (1989) or Luster (2002) that I’ve alluded to having in the works in the past? Well, no, obviously, because it says what the film in question is at the top of the page and it’s not either of those.

Benjamin (Colin Morgan) is a director whose debut work made a real splash seven years ago, and he’s been unable to live it down ever since. In that time, he’s had difficulty getting a project going, but now he’s just finishing up his second film in time for the London Film Festival, assuming he stops second guessing himself on the editing. Still, with it out of the way, he and his friends attend an art exhibition wherein he is immediately smitten with the singer in the band hired to do the entertainment in the bar after; French music student Noah (Phénix Brossard). It’s all very awkward, but they manage to hit it off anyway, eventually leading to Ben inviting him to the premiere. Unfortunately, the end result is a bit shit. He knows it, Mark Kermode knows it, everyone knows it. What then for his career and/or his love life?

I’d make a ‘write what you know’ joke, though apparently we’re officially declaring this to be Simon Amstell’s film directorial debut. There’s some debate over whether Carnage (2017) counts, but it seems the producers aren’t. Also the premise probably doesn’t really reflect his actual situation that much. I mean, there was less than eighteen months between the premieres of Carnage and Benjamin, and it’s not like he had a glorious debut then disappeared; you know, he was like a regular TV fixture for a good decade more or less, getting fired from Nickelodeon for reportedly being “sarcastic and mean” to children before getting hired elsewhere to be sarcastic and mean to pop stars, before falling off the face of the earth or dying or something. It’s only really obvious broadcast type view, he disappeared from anyway; he spent much of the last decade focussing on stand-up and writing and that. That said, from what we’re given, we can perhaps infer that the eponymous Benjamin is to some extent a self-insert in terms of his interests and neuroses.

As you might have guessed from the brevity of that synopsis, wherein I typically only cover the first act or so of a film, there isn’t actually all that much to the plot of the film. The whole affair clocks in at about 85 minutes, but doesn’t feel any great need to rush itself, instead taking a fairly leisurely look at the scenario and its players. Though I suppose that it gets the plot angle of finishing the film out of the way early rather than having it just be some kind of MacGuffin that occurs throughout is something a lot of films wouldn’t do. …That’s a confusing sentence, but I’m having trouble thinking of other ways to put it. Damn you, films with filmmaking in them. The focus on that end more being on the ‘what now?’ Having devoted yourself to a project, there’s inevitably a sense of feeling lost upon completion, even if you were driven to despair by it, even if you’re not satisfied with the result, and so the remainder of the film, beyond the romance angle, more considers where the character goes from here and the frustration of trying to find a new project to undertake. Also, yes, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo (primarily the former) do actually have cameos, the former reviewing Benjamin’s new film on their radio show.

Though, to be fair, one imagines that if he was particularly unhappy with the festival screening, he could edit it more. It’s not all that uncommon for films to get edited between festival screenings and general release,* though I guess arts ponce indie films of the type Benjamin’s apparently made don’t necessarily see wide release anyway and it may be better to cut and run; there’s always the chance the damage is already done.

That’s beside the point really, isn’t it?

So… apparently this thing’s status as ‘romantic comedy’ was kind of accidental, originally being intended as a rather more dark exploration of the character’s issues with intimacy that I’ve spent basically no time discussing here in favour of the artist side. It does seem like films about art inherently end up with a romantic angle. I wrote about Ruby Sparks (2012) before, I touched on it a little there, though Benjamin does avoid the trap that that film fell into; while it alludes to Benjamin’s (and other characters’) work having been good in the past, it resists the urge to try and show us what it thinks is ‘good’. (Good god, Paul Dano’s character’s ostensibly celebrated prose in that film really is some of the shittiest writing I’ve come across.) I probably could have more to say on that… but I’ll spare you most of it. The gist is that Amstell is apparently canny enough to have basically all the characters who are involved in the art world, not just the main character, be churning out failed art; some of the jokes there are low hanging fruit, but it’s better than trying to convince the audience of quality. 

Instead, let’s talk about the other bit. The accidental nature of the film’s romantic trappings is perhaps one of its big successes. Combined with the film’s lazy pacing, the relationship between Benjamin and Noah takes on an unusually (for a film) casual tone; even in times when it’s in crisis, even when something happens that would generally be rather melodramatic, it remains low key, without any grand gestures or displays of emotion. It’s actually quite remarkable how it manages to build up a convincing relationship in such a short space of time, and it manages it pretty much entirely just by having the characters hang out in a fairly general and not explicitly romantic manner. Also, drugs. Film has a very blasé attitude towards them, but not in that way that tries to call attention to how flippantly it’s treating the subject. So that’s fun.

Also fun is Amstell’s writing, with the dialogue enjoying the acerbic nature one came to expect from him back when, albeit in a more measured tone; there is a story to tell after all. It’s unfortunate then that some of it’s so difficult to hear; the morose nature of the character perhaps requires the muttering of the bulk of the film’s witticisms, but the sound mix manages to render them nigh inaudible at times. Still, if you can persevere (or, like, turn on subtitles, I guess), there’s a lot to enjoy in the film’s exploration of romantic and professional anxiety.

Also, again, it’s like 85 minutes long, so it’s not like it’s a massive time investment.

* Or sometimes after. We all remember that brouhaha with Cats (2019) getting a supposedly unprecedented updated version a few days after release. People did apparently forget that a week or so after its US release, Stanley Kubrick went and had an epilogue scene removed The Shining (1980); this apparently entailed demanding cinemas physically cut it out of prints and ship it back to Warners, seemingly never to be seen again. (That’s ignoring Kubrick’s later, reportedly preferred, international cut, which has far bigger and slightly more involved edits, because, you know, international cuts have historically been a whole thing.)