Go on, it's safe to buy British

In the wake of Four Weddings, British romantic comedy seemed doomed to tweeness; Ben Thompson meets the young directors determined to rescue it

The acid-tongued dandy and occasional film critic Quentin Crisp once scathingly envisioned humanity "sinking back into an amoebic state, where it will take a coagulation of hundreds of teenagers to make up a single unit of vital force".

On first acquaintance with the quartet of indecisive young people whose nocturnal encounters at a Glaswegian cafe supply what passes for narrative thrust in Saul Metzstein's début feature Late Night Shopping, the audience will know what he meant. However, as the film unfolds with a visual panache partly ­ but not wholly ­ attributable to the involvement of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave cinematographer Brian Tufano, the lethargic demeanour of its protagonists turns out to be code for an altogether different kind of energy.

"It's not exactly the bombing of Pearl Harbor," admits Metzstein wryly, "but I think the less you put into a film in terms of explicit subject matter, the more responsibility you have to really make something of it."

In fact, there's a broader significance to these characters' unexpectedly successful attempts to justify their existence on the big screen, beyond their director's determination to set himself a cinematic challenge. As they while away the small hours between shifts at jobs at an electronics factory, as a hospital porter, stacking supermarket shelves and working in a directory enquiries call centre, Late Night Shopping's warriors of the post-industrial wasteland are struggling to come to grips with the psychological impact of a changing employment landscape.

Metzstein describes his film as "a reaction to a socio-political reality which tends to greys rather than black and whites". What he seems to mean by this is that school- and college-leavers who would once have faced the stark alternatives of the dole or a 40-hour working week now face a cornucopia of temporary employment opportunities, but that far from contributing to a state of general well-being, this economic safety net actually contributes to a mind-set of unfocused carelessness. "In a way, the people in Late Night Shopping like the fact that they don't have to deal with things," Metzstein explains, "on the other hand, there's something frightening about a world which is so comforting that it never asks you to make a decision."

The mood that results ­ identified by the director as one of "vague existential horror" ­ suggests a comparison with another of the more encouraging British film releases of 2001, Jamie Thraves's The Low Down. Far from being (as is generally the way with first-time film-makers) outraged by a comparison with the work of a fellow débutant, Metzstein seems to be delighted by it, although he does point out that he didn't see The Low Down until after Late Night Shopping was finished.

"I think they're effectively the same film," he insists cheerily, "but we came to the opposite decision in every respect, except the casting of Kate Ashfield. We shot in very stagey wide shots, they shot in close-up, the acting in our film is kind of old-fashioned and theatrical while The Low Down's is incredibly naturalistic. And Jamie Thraves's film has a very specific location, whereas ours could be set anywhere, as one of the things we're trying to get across is the way life is so much less rooted now in the communal existence of specific places."

So where does the similarity part come in then? "I think both films could be seen as a reaction against a more bombastic tradition of British film-making, and a common misconception about the superiority of a certain kind of social realism, which I don't actually think is very realistic at all any more."

The other thing the two films have in common is that, in so far as either of them belong to a genre, they are both romantic comedies. Given that Metzstein's highest profile venture prior to Late Night Shopping was directing a Channel 4 documentary about Dogma 95, this is an unexpected move. But the possibility that the post-Four Weddings glut of terrible British romantic comedies might actually have paved the way for something more interesting will come as some comfort to all those who have had to sit through them.

"The film's scriptwriter, Jack Lothian and I made it our business to watch as many as possible," Metzstein explains grimly, "and some of the things we learnt were never to have a cameo with a famous person from the TV, and to do everything in your power to ensure that no-one could leave the cinema thinking the characters in the film are the sort of people the director would go to dinner parties with. It's also a good idea not to have one of those awful scenes where one character visits another character's parents and sociological divisions are made painfully explicit."

Never mind your Lars Von Triers and your Harmony Korines, this is the sort of revolutionary manifesto that could really turn the domestic film industry upside down. The forthcoming release of Jump Tomorrow ­ another shockingly watchable romantic-minded début (you wait your whole life for a visually engaging, British-directed light comedy, and then three come along in a year!) ­ can only add fuel to the fires of hope.

Director Joel Hopkins left the UK for New York University's prestigious graduate film course in 1994, and his charming, Jacques Tati-inspired debut was developed from a short, which won a competition whose previous victors included celebrated brothers-in-arms Spike Lee and Ang Lee.

While not quite guaranteeing Hopkins a future of that magnitude, this snazzily beguiling tale of a shy New Yorker of African extraction who falls in love with someone else on his way to marry a childhood friend certainly has a rare, cosmopolitan snap to it .

"I think the important thing," Hopkins explains, "was that even though I was making a romantic comedy, I wasn't actually conscious of doing it. I just wanted to do something at the opposite end of the spectrum from the moment in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels when Vinnie Jones smashes someone's head in a car door and opera is playing in the background."

If Quentin Crisp was still with us, one imagines this is an aspiration of which he might heartily approve.

'Late Night Shopping' is out next Friday. 'Jump Tomorrow' follows this summer