Brian and Charles

You might have heard the expression "Like a wet weekend in Wales" to signify dreariness.  The setting for this movie is very much from that idiom, the skies grey and threatening, the landscape bleak and foreboding, the rain never far off.   From this dismal background springs a fairy tale for the twenty first century.  And, like most fairy tales, with an element of morality at it's heart.

Middle aged Brian (David Earl) lives, alone, lonely and off-centre, in a remote farmstead in the Welsh mountains, and makes for his lack of human companionship by inventing (and eating a lot of cabbage).  Using whatever bits and pieces he has lying around, or garners from the rich source of fly tipping, he comes up with the weird and the wonderful and the downright dangerous.  Anyone need a belt to carry their eggs in?  And if one fails, then there's always something else to have a go at.  Brian has a fertile imagination.  Heath Robinson meets Wallace and Gromit.

His most ambitious project is a robot, with artificial intelligence.  The head of an old shop window mannequin, the body of a busted washing machine, random bit of this and that and, hey presto, Brian finally has a friend.  Charles Petrescu (Chris Hayward) turns out to be every bit as eccentric as his creator, and far more prone to getting into situations.  Eddie (Jamie Michie), the local bully, threatens, while Brian finds the android an aid to developing a stuttering relationship with the equally lonely and downtrodden Hazel (Louise Brealley).

It's shot as a sort-of of mockumentary, but doesn't cling slavishly to the format.  This is a free form low budget kind of a film, and that's a big part of the charm.  There's romance, bromance and, as the Film Board suggest, 'mild threat'!  Suspend disbelief, go with the fantasy, and there are plenty of laughs, a redemptive storyline and lots of daftness.  And if you're looking for a moral, then the message that human relationships, and love, can take many forms is something we all need reminding of.

If you do go to see Brian and Charles, and I think you should, do yourself a favour and stay right through the credits at the end.  You'll be rewarded, visually and aurally, for your wait.