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directed by Susan Johnson
by Bill Chambers True story: Carrie, dining alone, catches eyes with a handsome stranger across the restaurant. He confidently strides up to her table and she starts rambling on about how she's flattered but not interested, after which I said, in perfect unison with the handsome stranger on screen, "I was just going to ask if I could borrow your chair." Am I psychic? No, I'm just fluent in Sitcom. Incidentally, this cheap bit of embarrassment humour scored laughs instead of groans at my screening, which suggests that a generation throwing TV away has blinded them to its hackneyed standbys. (It also suggests these tropes are adapting to new habitats rather than dying off.) If only it were an isolated moment, but Carrie Pilby is stuck in such well-grooved territory that it's mindlessly anachronistic at times, like when the title character, a present-day 19-year-old girl with a smart phone, uses the Personals to get a date like the prototype for her New York neurotic would have once upon a time. There's old-school–which she most certainly is–and then there's, y'know, Amish. British expat Carrie (Bel Powley) is an extremely young Harvard grad living like a hermit off her father's dime in NYC. She's pretentious ("Van Goff," "Franny and Zoë"), uptight, sarcastic, entitled. Urging her to be more accommodating of people, a shrink friend of the family (Nathan Lane) prescribes a to-do list that translates to "find a boyfriend," outlining as it does a plot trajectory destined to climax on the cinema's emblem of the romantic pinnacle, New Year's Eve. Disappointing that gender-shuffling the Woody Allen and Manic Pixie Dreamgirl archetypes–the charming Cy (William Moseley), conveniently situated next door to Carrie, plays the didgeridoo when he's not using it as a bong–leads to the same dead-end happy ending; that the evil suitor (Colin O'Donoghue) is just another '80s ski-movie douchebag destined to be quelled by a punch to the face; that Carrie's defenses are reduced to a lot of Freudian baggage. Looking like regional advertising (only Powley's Bette Davis eyes are of aesthetic interest), Carrie Pilby is as synthetically directed as it is written, and the performers struggle. Programme: Special Presentations
