Late Night Shopping – 2001 | 91mins | Drama, Romance | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Quirky urban comedy from debutant director Saul Metzstein about a quartet of insecure twenty-something slackers contemplating their mundane lives and philosophising on nothing in particular. Stylishly filmed in Glasgow by cinematographer Brian Tufano and brilliantly scripted by Jack Lothian, Late Night Shopping is an understated but delightfully romantic tale of down-to-earth characters that are easy to like. The only drawback is a contrived ending to the many threads of the story.

Sean (Luke De Woolfson), Lenny (Enzo Cilenti), Vincent (James Lance), and Jody (Kate Ashfield) are a group of four friends who work the night shift and meet up every evening at the local coffee house to swap notes on most things including their love lives. They are stuck in dead end jobs, going nowhere; Sean is a lovesick porter working the night shift at a hospital, shy Lenny is an operator for directory enquiries pining for a co-worker, sympathetic ladette Jody works in computer assembly factory and Vincent is a supermarket shelf-stacker.

They amuse themselves by watching shallow womaniser Vincent’s success in attracting the opposite sex, things change however when Vincent sleeps with Sean’s girlfriend Madeline (Heike Makatash). The ‘friends’ ‘ embark on a quest to a seaside resort – in a car with a radio that refuses to play anything other than an 80s revival station – so that one of them can patch things up with his ex-girlfriend.