The Lawless Heart (15)

The heart of the matter

A crucial scene in Lawless Heart shows a cadaverous Essex man, Dan, (Bill Nighy), face turned to the ceiling of his car, making sad animal noises while a woman's head bobs up and down on his groin. It's the most poignant blow job of the year, yet what makes it special isn't so much the lack of tenderness (soulless sex with slapper-esque women being a cinema staple) but the fact that this damp moment comes at the end of his quest for salvation, not the beginning. We expect things to wrap with redemption, or at least an explosion. Dan, and his distress, have been neglected for so long that his cries for help don't even make the woman look up.

Lawless Heart is a film in three segments, each beginning (à la Pulp Fiction) at the same point – the funeral for Dan's gay brother-in-law, Stuart. And if Dan's "flash forward" makes for the bleakest sojourn, the other two – respectively shadowing Stuart's frozen boyfriend, Nick (Tom Hollander) and Stuart's sloppy cousin, Tim (Douglas Henshall) – are hardly walks in the park.

That probably made the film a nightmare for the writer/directors Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger to sell. Three degrees of numbness in a backwater of Essex doesn't exactly sound like a blast. Which just goes to show why movies shouldn't be reduced to the perfect pitch. It feels entirely appropriate that the film's three leads have all featured in Brit-pics "guaranteed" to make us cough up cash, from Lucky Break to Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence and This Year's Love. Where those films chased the feel-good factor with noisy, joyless persistence, Hunter and Hunsinger show what can happen if you opt instead for the humour that accompanies can-I-feel? quiet. Turns out wit and warmth and keen observation produce their own euphoria – what you might call a natural high.

The trick is that, initially, Dan couldn't seem less real. We first meet him talking to a middle-aged French woman among the gloomy, grieving throng and his patter – complete with Eeyore sighs and lazy, long-fingered hand movements – seems like something left over from Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. Her interest in him, however, is fresh. Her eyes widen at his mordant quips (getting the joke, but also what lies beneath it) and his shocked pleasure at the attention is tangible. Lovely details clue us in to his status in the village (he goes to the bar, not for a drink but for matches, causing the barmaid to snap her eyes in scorn). Cigarette alight, he returns to the woman (a Jeanne Moreau type, weathered and wise) and inhales like a man sucking light into a dark tunnel. She tells him about a crisis in her own life, which gave her the courage to change direction. He hovers on the brink of knowing exactly what she means. You find yourself gripped by Nighy's face. On his death-chair, talking to Melvyn Bragg, Dennis Potter wore that same ferocious, giddy look. You know the intimacy can't last, but when this anonymous woman pops off to the toilet (she's not a relative, she did the flowers), you're left as breathless as him.

In virtually any other movie, the next 65 minutes would involve reconnecting this well-met pair. But here, the fact that Dan is married is more than an obstacle to be deftly overcome. Dan is denied redemption because he ultimately doesn't know what his new friend, Corinne (Clémentine Célarié) is talking about. She's offering support. He thinks she's offering herself. And a delicious, extra layer of subtlety is that even this prospect terrifies him.

The film's standout scene finds him accidentally meeting Nick in a pub, while agonizing over whether to accept a Saturday-night invitation from Corinne. He begins to quiz Nick on the faithfulness or not of "your lot" (ie gays). It's his own fidelity, however, that he's pondering. "It's about courage, isn't it?" he says, to which Nick replies, "I think it's more to do with consideration. You have to think about what you're jeopardising... I don't think it's to do with courage." Dan's face lights up and we realise he's in a world of his own. "Yes," he says approvingly. "Courage." Sharp intake of breath. "That's the word."

Hunter and Hunsinger have confessed that they wrote their script in response to Eric Rohmer's three-parter, Rendezvous in Paris, because they liked Rohmer's first segment so much and felt the loss of the characters so badly. It feels cruel to point out that Bill Nighy's narrative dominates in the same way. Even though it's a boon to have him pop up in both other tales, he sets a standard that's hard to match.

That said, Nick's chapter has some wonderful moments. Thanks to a party thrown by Tim, Nick finds himself entangled with a chaotic girl called Charlie (Sukie Smith) and his polite/uptight resistance to her leaky charms gets the screwball balance just right. Their subsequent attempt at a relationship, though, is only fitfully convincing. One's guess is that Charlie is based on a character the writers met, but never actually got to know.

Even so, she's a hundred times better than the object of Tim's attentions. Leah (Josephine Butler) is a chic non-entity whose feelings for a mystery man are completely generic. She's a Cold Feet character, in what we've come to feel is an Eric Rohmer landscape (the film was shot in Maldon which, through this lens, looks just like one of Rohmer's prosaically precise, out-on-a-limb seaside towns).

What gets us through act three's yawny melodrama is the neatest of plotting. What Hunter and Hunsinger catch about lives is the fact that however closely they're braided together, there will always be things people don't know. When we see Tim wearing a hideous scarf while walking along the shore, it takes us a second to realise it's the same one Dan's wife received as a birthday gift. We're seeing the world through Nick's eyes, which is why this detail doesn't make sense. Only when we see it through Tim's does the scarf's trajectory become elegantly obvious.

If there's a message to the film, it's that small-town life isn't simple. Just as in the densest of cities, the big picture is something individuals can grasp for but never achieve. Tim's friendship with the blow-job girl adds the final touch. She might just have been a stupidly bobbing blonde head. But like everyone else in this rich, satisfying film, she's granted her own point of view. Emily Dickinson advised aspiring poets to "tell the truth, but tell it slant". At its best, Lawless Heart creates some stunning angles.