Former lovers meet for lunch in London after having lost touch for more than a decade.
The reunion doesn’t end well.
Don’t worry: I’m not giving anything away. You’ll figure that out within the first minutes of The Song of Lunch, a Masterpiece Contemporary presentation set for Sunday on PBS.
The man, a sadly self-aggrandizing copy editor for a publishing house in London, leaves his office at midday to meet his former lover for lunch at what used to be their favorite Italian restaurant.
Narrating his every step, he is taken aback when he walks into the place. Instead of checkered tablecloths and wax-encrusted Chianti-bottle candleholders, he finds a stark, crisply minimalist restaurant staffed with surly young waiters and waitresses.
He, played by Alan Rickman, begins drinking even before the arrival of his former flame, played by Emma Thompson.
The characters have no names.
She now lives in Paris, married to a successful writer, and the fact that her companion, ogling waitresses as he downs glass after glass of Chianti, is still single is hardly a surprise.
Christopher Reid has adapted his own narrative poem, which, in turn, was inspired by a scene in Ulysses. Oh, and the story takes place in the Bloomsbury section of London.
Our small amusement at the conceit of having the man narrate his thoughts and actions evaporates as soon as we peg him as pompous and ill-suited to anyone’s company, including that of a lover.
But the narration continues, more or less, throughout the film.
Only the fact that Thompson’s character once loved him makes us consider the possibility that he wasn’t always such a drunken jackass.
Thompson and Rickman are enjoyable enough in otherwise-unbelievable roles.
Yes, TheSong of Lunch is loaded with intentional irony, including Rickman’s self-narration. It is also a clever but not especially engaging construct.
That doesn’t make it terribly interesting, but the special lasts only an hour.
The Columbus Dispatch
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