Late Night Shopping (The Scottish Connection #2)

Directed by Saul Metzstein in 2001, Late Night Shopping tells the tale of four unfulfilled twentysomethings trapped in tedious jobs and working night shifts, their work hours dictating that their social lives barely extend beyond meeting up at an open all hours cafe for a coffee and chat.

Don’t expect a Ken Loach bleakfest though about alienation and the evils of globalisation. Late Night Shopping is a comedy and a rather sharp comedy at that.

So, what are these tedious jobs you may be wondering – and even maybe wondering too whether you might share the same job description?

Well, Jody (Kate Ashfield) works on a micro-electronics assembly line, Sean (Luke de Woolfson) is a hospital porter – which doesn’t strike me as that bad a job; Lenny (Enzo Cilenti) earns his crust as a call centre enquiries operator while Vincent (James Lance) stacks shelves in a supermarket.

As Vincent’s workmate Joe puts cheerily puts it: ‘Lovers leave. Parties end. Bad jobs go on forever.’ This wasn’t actually true back then in Britain anyway but recent governments seem to reckon it’s the way to go. Watch that retirement age continue to grow, folks.

The main premise of Late Night Shopping, it would have to be admitted, doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. But before going into that, a word on our quartet of slackers.

Lenny is hopeless with women. Asked by Jody whether he finds her attractive, he can’t answer. The correct answer being ‘highly’. He also suffers from porno reactions but I won’t go into that here. Womanising Vincent strives to be shallow as possible; Jody is feisty or at least tries to present herself as feisty and Sean’s more than a little hopeless.

Okay, the premise. Sean lives – or at least thinks he lives – with Madeline (Heike Makatsch). The couple haven’t though spoken in three weeks. After a row, Sean began trying to avoid her and this proved easy due to their conflicting shift patterns. Now he’s not even sure if she’s moved out or not so checks items like soap and towels for any signs of life.

I doubt very much Miss Marple would be required to solve this particular mystery but remember, this isn’t social realism, this is a comedy with the humour ranging from the wry – like Jody wearing an ‘On the Road’ T-shirt for the gang’s visit to the seaside – to the belly laugh funny. You might remember in a recent post I mentioned a hellish situation where, much to the annoyance of the passengers, a car radio gets jammed on an AOR station. Cue the likes of Kayleigh by Marillion, Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is and China In Your Hands by T’Pau.

And now a word on the locations. Late Night Shopping is set mostly in a nocturnal neon-lit city that could be just about anywhere in Europe but is mainly Glasgow with some shots of London thrown in too. The cafe where the group of pals chew the fat is the Variety Bar on Sauchiehall Street, well the exterior anyway but other than that there’s no attempt to utilise any iconic Glasgow landmarks and this is exactly what the filmmaking team wanted.

Seeing Shallow Grave was a huge influence on writer Jack Lothian. ‘A Scottish film which is modern and contemporary and it’s not about being Scottish, it’s just actually a story, it just happens to be set in Scotland.’

Glasgow is never named in his film and none of the four leads are Scottish.

A good idea? Here I’m screwing up my face a little as I type. At least it would never be deemed necessary to subtitle the dialogue in the English speaking world outside Scotland which might help out at the box office and yeah, big cities are becoming more and more homogenised but I hate the homogenization of our towns and cities and would consequently rather see somewhere with a very individual character onscreen.

Not that the entire film is set within the boundary of a city as I hinted at earlier.

In cinema’s illustrious history many great films have made use of fantastic locations across the planet and even outer space for their climaxes.

Here Sean, Lenny, Jody and Vincent pile into a car and drive down to Light Haven (which is mainly Saltcoats), a little coastal town whose main attraction appears to be a crazy golf course adjacent to two giant King Kong inflatables. Sadly, these were built by the film’s art department especially for the shoot.

Late Night Shopping is a bit like an old friend. I watch it every three or four years and always enjoy it and always laugh at the AOR tracks, although it must have been an expensive gag with a reasonably significant chunk of the budget being spent securing the rights to all that musical dross.

I should mention here that there’s an amusing commentary too as an extra which makes a change from the usual praising every single person that stepped on to the set bollocks that is guaranteed to bore me rigid. The director even has a gentle jibe at a minor cast member Nigel Buckland, the ex-presenter of Vids and the Welsh Barry Norman – well if Barry had been a potty mouthed, madcap peroxide blond, prone to sarcastically slaughtering films while wearing only Y-fronts or being pushed around in a shopping trolley.

Buckland plays Vincent’s boss and Jack Lothian himself also puts in a few blink and you’ll miss him appearances in the background as one of Vincent’s co-workers.

He was probably an ideal choice as he used to work in my local Safeway – a fact that generated some incredulous local press at the time, along the lines of ‘how amazing that someone who’d had a crap job could be capable of writing a film script let alone one that might be worth watching’.

Which Late Night Shopping definitely is.

Trivia:

Saul Metzstein worked on Trainspotting, part of his job entailing him helping to find the Diane character. This task called for him to walk up to girls in Glasgow streets asking any potential Diane if she would like to be in a movie. And here I’m conjuring up an image of some gallus lassie on Argyle Street giving it, ‘Aw, never heard that wan before,’ before striding on and muttering, ‘Creep.’

And speaking of that film, the shot of Jody and Sean drinking milkshakes is a hommage to the scene in Trainspotting with Spud and Renton, where Spud has a little dab of speed before a riotous interview.

Finally, when Metzstein first met Jack Lothian, the latter was working on a novel called Last Exit to Anniesland.