Funny-man Amstell takes an unforgiving look in the mirror
Benjamin (15) Verdict: Tender and funny ★★★★✩
COINCIDENTALLY, two films come out this week about a troubled boy called Ben (see Ben Is Back review, below right). In this one, it’s neuroses, not addiction, that assail the title character.
Benjamin is the feature debut as writer- director of comedian Simon Amstell. If you’ve seen much of his TV work, you’ll recognise the film’s titular hero as the kind of man he usually plays himself: gay, witty, engagingly self- deprecating, but also socially insecure, romantically gauche and racked by anxiety.
Indeed, according to what we read in interviews, that’s precisely the kind of person Amstell is. So, on several levels, this is a film about himself, an unforgiving look in the mirror.
As Benjamin, Colin Morgan does Amstell proud. It’s a very likeable performance. he plays a young film director, from northern Ireland but living in trendy east london, who has just made his second picture, seven years after his first.
his debut was extremely wellreceived, but now he is worried that he has set his bar too high. ‘Ideally, I’d have just made that [first] film and died,’ he says.
While giving vent to his angst, his self- doubt compounded by a pushy publicist nicely played by Jessica Raine and later by a savage review ( film critics can be terribly heartless), Benjamin falls for the charming French singer noah (Phenix Brossard).
They meet at a launch party, not for a new film or album, but a new kind of chair.
Amstell clearly had great fun satirising the pretentiousness of london ‘creatives’. And, in a more selfflagellating way, in poking fun at Benjamin’s monumental awkwardness.
Anyway, the two men become a couple, but there’s always a sense that budding romance is not particularly safe in Benjamin’s delicate, but clumsy, hands.
With strong support from Anna Chancellor as Benjamin’s straight-talking producer, and Joel Fry as his friend Stephen, whose own efforts to make it as a stand-up comic are suitably hapless, this is a tender, funny and, at times, painful film.