In the week in which the W***d C*p begins its unstoppable march across our TV screens, the last thing you might feel you want to see is yet another action replay, but make an exception for My Dinner With Oswald, the latest offering in the Short Cuts series on Network 2, which recreates the most famous assassination in world history within the confines of a Dublin sitting-room. The Oswald in question is Lee Harvey, the infamous lone gunman in the Texas Book Depository on that fateful day in Dallas in 1963.
Like all the best stories, My Dinner With Oswald has its roots in real life, says screenwriter Donald Clarke: "I was drinking with a friend, and we were having this incredibly tedious argument about what happened in Dallas, to the point where we thought of moving furniture around to re-enact the events. As it happened, we didn't actually do it, but I thought it would be a good idea for a story."
If Oliver Stone brought the obsessive replay from television into the movies with his meticulous recreation of the Zapruder film in JFK, Clarke and director Paul Duane have done the same thing more convincingly on a rather smaller budget and in a fraction of the time (these boys could teach Stone a thing or two about brevity, not to mention a sense of humour). In Duane and Clarke's cheerfully absurdist comedy, a dinner party deteriorates into drink-fuelled chaos when the host's obsession with events at Dealey Plaza takes over. As arguments and theories proliferate around the table, condiments and tableware are pressed into service to prove different points of view about such familiar subjects as the grassy knoll and bullet trajectories. With the madness increasing, bookshelves, sofas and tablecloths become Dallas landmarks, and neighbours are dragged from their beds to fill the minor roles in the drama. All this manic energy leads to a final, shattering revelation - or does it? Tune in to find out.
With a talented comic cast including Pat Kinevane, Arthur Riordan and Mark Doherty, Oswald is shot by Duane and cameraman James Mather in a vibrant colour scheme, all shocking pinks and yellows - the nearest thing yet in an Irish film to the inspired kitschness of Pedro Almodovar. "It's a reaction against that dread naturalism you get in most Irish shorts," Clarke says. "Paul believed - quite wisely I think - that it would be good to have a sort of Warner Brothers cartoon-like look to the whole thing. Personally, I like the fact that it looks a little like the inside of the Simpsons' house."
This is the last in the current series of Short Cuts, the scheme jointly funded by RTE and the Film Board which has become the premier source of short Irish drama.
Given that any Irish film with the slightest relationship to real-life events seems to come under attack these days, can we expect this to receive the same criticism as Michael Collins or The General? Clarke doesn't think so. "Our idea was simply that My Dinner With Oswald would be exactly like JFK - except that it's three hours shorter and it still doesn't make any sense."
My Dinner With Oswald is on Network 2 on Wednesday at 10.10 p.m.