Comfort and Joy

The great Scottish writer/director Bill Forsyth followed up his 1983 masterpiece Local Hero with this charming little comedy that imagines the Glasgow ice cream wars were actually fought over frozen dessert. Bill Paterson plays a local radio DJ whose girlfriend decides, out of the blue, to leave him on Christmas Eve. Depressed, at loose ends, and searching for something to give his middle-aged existence some meaning, he witnesses a vicious attack on an ice cream van by a violent competitor. This leads him into the middle of a conflict between two Italian families battling for control of Glasgow's ice cream market. Like Peter Riegert in Local Hero, Paterson plays an attractive sad-sack who we immediately root for. But the supporting characters aren't as wonderfully memorable here as in the writer/director's earlier pictures. In Comfort and Joy, it's the premise and authentic feeling of the sparsely populated corners of the city in which it takes place that draw us in. And, if you're patient, you get some genuine laugh-out-loud moments.

While making Local Hero, co-star Peter Capaldi, who came from an ice-cream-selling family, regaled Forsyth with anecdotes about the ice cream wars. These were, in fact, violent turf battles fought in the early 1980s around Glasgow's East End between rival criminal gangs who sold drugs and stolen goods out of ice cream vans. But Capaldi's stories made it sound like these wars were fought by vendors over who had the best ice cream. Also around this time, Scotland was enjoying the new phenomena of local radio station licenses, and Forsyth loved the fact that there were now provincial Scottish celebrities who people felt they knew from listening to them every morning or night but then could actually meet at a public appearance like the opening of a supermarket. He put the two ideas together to create this story. A native Glaswegian, Forsyth always brings verisimilitude to his delightfully skewed comedies about community, which is why they never feel overly quirky or twee like so many UK comedies that followed. Still, Comfort and Joy is almost too low-key. Like a good hard ice cream, it's satisfying but doesn't exactly fill you up.