I saw Kiss Of Life on Saturday afternoon. There were three other people in the cinema. Which may seem an indictment of the state of the British Film industry, until you guess how many people actually liked it. I don’t think I am assuming to much to suggest that we all thought it was pretty lousy. There really isn’t anything to like in it.
One the one hand we have aid worker Peter Mullan stick in Serbia. On the other we have his family in London. He can’t get home and his wife is pissed off with him being away all the time. After the squabble he decides to try to make it home. And his wife gets killed on a zebra crossing. We spend the rest of the film cross cutting between Mullan travelling slowly through Serbia with an ominous feeling, the grieving family and the ghostly presence of the mother reliving memories. Maybe it wants to be a film about loss, maybe there is a war/family comparison. But actually it is a film rather unclear of what it is about at all. Performances are nice but pointless, it is shot well though the whole thing does have the air of a film constructed entirely in the edit from ‘meaningful scenes’. And it is dull, trite and even at 80 minutes feels flabby. Debut film, written and directed by Emily Young. She can direct, but maybe she should look at someone else’s scripts.