Funny Cow (15)
Movies about comedy are rarely funny but Funny Cow takes the sad clown cliché to such a grim extreme it becomes almost laughable. Starring the excellent Maxine Peake’s as an aspiring British stand-up in the sexist, racist, homophobic environs of the Northern working men’s clubs of the 1970s and early 1980s, the film around her is such a wilfully incoherent mess it renders her performance all but dead on arrival. She plays the eponymous Funny Cow (no other character name is given), a battered wife who has apparently found success by transforming the trauma of her life into a stage act that mixes the sort of politically incorrect gags of the era with uncomfortable confessionals about her childhood, her marriage and her surroundings. By using a more elliptical structure, the film strives to give some sense of the chaos of its protagonist’s life, but that’s not the same thing as making it compelling on screen. In the end it feels like a hollow and rather pointless exercise.