Please Give

Directed by Nicole Holofcener. Starring Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall. 15A cert, Cineworld/IFI/Light House/Movies@Dundrum, Dublin, 90 min

Snob appeal and sanctimoniousness are skewered in this perceptive comedy, writes DONALD CLARKE

YOU CAN always rely on Nicole Holofcener. With features such as Lovely & Amazingand Friends With Money, the American director has proved adept at composing comedies that address contemporary middle-class discontents.

The movies never look particularly nice. Please Giveseems, once again, to be filmed by technicians with an unhealthy taste for muddied greys and annihilated browns. The characters are rarely very lovable (solipsism is a common disease in Holofcener Central) but her films are always impeccably acted and beautifully shaped.

The core of this latest ensemble piece is the relationship between two Manhattanites with different attitudes towards their privileged place in the world. Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt play Kate and Alex, a couple who make a living buying faded furniture from bereaved relatives and flogging the items to snooty urban connoisseurs of supposed design classics.

As the film begins, their professional and private lives are coming in to collision. Kate and Alex have bought the apartment next door, but, alas, they can’t knock through until its inhabitant, a mean old lady played by Ann Guilbert, shuffles to a better place. In the meantime, they attempt to make friends with her two granddaughters: a sombre but decent radiologist (Rebecca Hall) and a snappy. bad-tempered beautician (Amada Peet).

Whereas Kate frets constantly about the morality of their business and their responsibility to the urban poor, Alex seems cheerily resigned to their good fortune. It’s a neat conflict that allows for many anguished tussles.

At times, Holofcener plays cleverly with our expectations: Alex, the most balanced, most well-adjusted of the characters, is the one who elects to initiate a creepy, extramarital affair; Kate’s well-meaning concern causes to her to patronise passing African- Americans.

On other occasions, the film seems desperately schematic: the good sister administers mammograms to worried pensioners; the bad sister gives facials to pampered shopaholics.

Still, it’s hard to frown at a film that allows its characters to spend the entire duration worrying about the rights and wrongs of spending $250 on a pair of jeans.

It's worth noting that Nicole directed a few episodes of Sex and the City. Welcome back from the Dark Side, Ms Holofcener.