Director: Darren Thornton

Stars: James McArdle, Fionnula Flanagan, Dearbhla Molloy, Paddy Glynn, Stella McCusker

This loose Irish remake of Gianni Di Gregorio’s 2008 Italian picture ‘Mid-August Lunch’ loses some of the gentle melancholy of the original but features some amusing and affecting moments. Edward (McArdle) is a queer up-and-coming novelist who lives with his eighty-one year-old mother Alma (Flanagan). Although he writes queer YA love stories, romance is absent from Edward’s life as he is now pretty much a full-on carer for Alma, his straight married brother having left the family home some years earlier. A tender early sequence shows him helping Alma, who is in a wheelchair, and who can only speak via her iPad, get dressed. Shy, retiring and a little neurotic, Edward is under pressure to go to the U.S. to do a promotional book tour. Then, when his three closest friends, who also care for their elderly mothers, but who are desperate to recapture their youth, decide to go on a package holiday, they fix it so Edward is left looking after all four mums. The picture features a touching portrait of the travails, disappointments and longings of queer men of a certain age, and McArdle is both sympathetic and understandably snippy, even when his acquiescence to his selfish friends’ increasingly outrageous demands is frustrating. It loses momentum a little in the broader third act and borders on contrived and sentimental, but it’s an appealing, and at ninety minutes brisk, watch.

David Willoughby

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