Directed by Nigel Cole. Starring Amara Karan, Reece Ritchie, Meera Syal, Harish Patel 15A cert, Cineworld, Dublin, 93 mins
ALL IN GOOD TIME began life as a 1963 play by Bill Naughton, the Ballyhaunis-born author of Alfie.
It was later rejigged as The Family Way, a Paul McCartney- scored film starring Hayley and John Mills, and was again revisited in the 1980s as kitchen-sink adornment for The Smiths singles Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before and I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish.
This contemporised and Tandoori-fried remake from the director of Calendar Girls and Ayub Khan-Din, the screenwriter of East Is East, retains the old- fashioned bedroom dilemma of the original material. Atul (Reece Ritchie) and Vina (Amara Karan) are northern English newlyweds who simply cannot find a suitable opportunity to consummate their marriage.
First it’s the rowdy post-wedding party, followed by a collapsing bed. Across the street there’s a Macbeth-inspired trinity of gossipy neighbours. At home there’s an interfering father-in-law (Harish Patel) and a well- meaning, anxious mum (Meera Syal). Then there’s the bankrupt travel agency they booked their honeymoon with.
But before you can say “ooh er, missus”, the farcical tone gives way to domestic drama, familial secrets and a simultaneously heartbreaking and clownish turn from Patel.
The theatricality of the source works well in the claustrophobic two-up, two-down redbrick setting where the young marrieds find themselves trapped between their parents making out in the bedroom next door and post-curry action in the bathroom.
Their close-knit community only intensifies their paranoia about not doing the deed. It’s hard not to think that everybody is sniggering behind your back when everybody is sniggering behind your back.
The film doesn’t always work. Like Made in Dagenham, the director’s most recent outing, some of the jokes belong in the same museum where they keep Naughton’s first draft of the play. And bizarrely, having managed the darkening of tone with aplomb, the drama’s biggest revelation is mishandled and needlessly repeated at the coda.
Still, it’s hard not to cheer for the quartet at the centre. Will they ever untangle themselves long enough to get, well, entangled?
