THE COMIC EFFECT

REVIEWED - FESTIVAL: "Have you ever met a nice comedian?" Daniela Nardini's hardened journalist asks despairingly - and rhetorically - towards the close of Annie Griffin's Altman-esque poke around the seedier corners of the Edinburgh Festival.

It is a measure of Griffin's success that she manages to mount a denunciation of the incestuous self-indulgence that characterises the contemporary comedy scene without drifting into preciousness herself. This is a highly original film featuring a bracingly grim worldview. The principal characters are, by turns, selfish, depressed, alcoholic, gossipy, pretentious and jaded. Here we have a Bartholomew Fair for the glum generation.

Space precludes any comprehensive description of the film's many plots and subplots. The principal focus of the action is the competition for a comedy award named - the makers of a certain mineral water not being amenable - The Comedy Award.

The most prominent member of the judging panel is a superhumanly selfish comedian (Stephen Mangan from TV's Green Wing), who, Griffin claims, is not based on anybody in particular, but who may remind some readers of a particular Perrier winner of the 1990s. Among the main contenders for the award we find a drunken Irish malcontent (Chris O'Dowd) and a loud-mouthed idiot who adopts a Jewish persona for comic effect (Lucy Punch). Deirdre O'Kane scuttles between them amusingly as a chatty amateur actor from Athlone who has won a place on the jury.

Shot in murky shades by Danny Cohen, featuring a powerfully shrill score by Jim Sutherland, the picture is terrifically well acted throughout. Griffin, who wrote and directed The Book Club on BBC, does perhaps rely a little too heavily on the obvious laughs to be derived from bad performance, but Festival emerges as a bracingly caustic entertainment that sits well with the current renaissance in bleak British (and Irish) comedy. It is also surprisingly sexually explicit. So, if such things bother you, beware.