Cemetery Junction

Directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant

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Written and directed by the British comedy dream team of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant the pair who created TV gold with The Office and Extras, Cemetery Junction is a surprising debut film.

If you're expecting cringe-comedy similar to Gervais and Merchant's sitcoms, there's a little of that, but ifCemetery Junctionnf is an unexpectedly sentimental coming-of-age drama.

Modestly ambitious Freddie Taylor (Christian Cooke) is determined not to fritter his life away toiling in a factory like his working-class dad (Gervais) and best mate Bruce (Tom Hughes). Instead, he lands a job selling life insurance for ntsGwithnte local success story Mr Kendrick (Ralph Fiennes).

It's 1973 and Freddie, Bruce and their hopeless mate Snork (Jack Doolan) are marking time in sleepy Cemetery Junction, a town the swinging 60s seem to have skipped. The lads regularly get into trouble in the weekends, getting into fights and spending the night in the cells, waiting for a friendly policeman to let them out. But Freddie is getting tired of the same old routine.

It all changes when Freddie meets his childhood sweetheart Julie Kendrick (Felicity Jones). Julie has ambitions to become a photographer and an infectious desire to travel the world, even though her future seems settled now she's engaged to a carbon-copy of her dad, ambitious insurance salesman Mike Ramsay (Matthew Goode).

It seems her destiny is to end up like her mother (Emily Watson), ignored and taken for granted. It's far from ground-breaking - you can probably guess what happens without seeing the movie - but there are some nice touches.

There are some laugh-out-loud moments and some howlers, but many are too far apart. The costume and art departments have done a great job recreating the feel of the 70s, but the dialogue often seems to belie this with a series of jokes involving the c-word juxtaposed with one character getting told off for swearing when he used the word ``bollocks''.

There is some nice comic interplay between Gervais, who is thoroughly unconvincing as a blue-collar dad in stubble and a singlet, his equally thoughtlessly racist wife (Julia Davis) and bigoted gran (Anne Reid).

It's an odd mix, with the comedy not consistently funny enough and the drama not quite dramatic enough. The romance never gets off the ground either, despite the attractiveness of the young actors. You know a screenplay is in trouble when you find yourself more mesmerised by the actors' period hairstyles than the action.

With the once-groundbreaking Gervais and Merchant in charge for the first time, we expect something more satisfying than a flimsy, formulaic nostalgia trip with ultimately nothing new to say. It's not dreadful, but for a far more convincing and comedic English coming-of-age period piece, better to see An Education.

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