Humpday

Directed by Lynn Shelton. Starring Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmore, Lynn Shelton Club, IFI, Dublin, 94 min

FOUR YEARS ago, a scruffy, proudly transgressive drama called Mysterious Skinwas the only film that dared open against Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. This is what industry wonks call counter- programming. When the biggest mainstream film of the year is stomping about cinemas, offer those who pride themselves on not being mainstream a place to hide.

Once again, just one little film is facing up to the biggest beast of the season (since you ask, Alvin and his Chipmunks aren’t with us until Monday) and once again, that film is a dog-eared indie entertainment featuring a degree of sexual experimentation.

Humpday, the anti- Avatarin question, could almost serve as a parody of a particular class of no-budget Seattle-based relationship comedy. The straight world is held in a degree of suspicion. People are far too happy to share their stupid feelings. Nobody attempts to annihilate any planetary systems. The only thing Humpdayhas in common with Avataris the means of its projection.

The picture begins with a young married couple being woken from their beds in the early hours of the morning. After stumbling blearily downstairs, Ben (Mark Duplass) is surprised to open the door on his old drinking buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard). Before long, to the annoyance of Ben’s slightly purse-mouthed wife, Andrew’s louche, anti-establishment attitudes begin to destabilise an otherwise happy marriage.

Older readers will see hints of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, a key British sitcom of the 1970s, in the opening acts of Humpday, but, from what I recall, Rodney Bewes and James Bolam never attempted to make a gay porn film together. The scheme, part of a nauseating "art project" being hatched by one of Andrew's beatnik associates, further disrupts the couple's marriage and causes the two pals to reconsider their sexuality.

The film-makers have not written quite enough story for their brief film, and the cast is required to fill up the gaps with endless, quasi-improvised jabbering. Happily, much of the talk is quite witty and the picture doesn’t (I think) take its characters as seriously as they take themselves.

There are worse ways of avoiding giant blue aliens.