Don't Worry about Me

SYNOPSIS

With Stuart Nicholas White's camera venerating the Mersey skyline, actor David Morrissey's first feature as director is an exile's love letter to his home city. Yet, while it switches adroitly between luminous vistas and forlorn backstreets, this adaptation of Helen Elizabeth and James Brough's play, The Pool, is very much an actors' piece. The action follows Brough's cocky southerner as his trek north to follow up a one-night stand leads to a meeting with Elizabeth's soft-hearted bookie's clerk. Made for just 100,000, the movie occasionally betrays its stage origins, particularly during the loquacious passages atop Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral and inside a local parish church. But Morrissey clearly empathises with the characters and, in eliciting laudably naturalistic performances from his leads (both making their feature debut), he succeeds in capturing the same European sensibility that Richard Linklater brought to Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004).