Reality Check

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: BAD BEHAVIOUR

DIRECTOR: LES BLAIR

THE BOTTOM LINE: An improvised movie drifts engagingly toward some small, simple truths about improvised lives.

IN LIEU OF RENOVATING HER LIFE, Ellie McAllister (the luminous Sinead Cusack) decides to renovate her loo. Redecoration instead of redirection: it is probably the most pervasive of middle-class sublimations.

But fixing up the bathroom is never quite as easy as it seems. For one thing, all these strangers start trooping through your house, your life, dragging their tools and their problems behind them. This being Kentish Town, in the north of London, they all want a cup of tea (or something stronger) as part of the bargain. For another, all you have to show at the end is a diminished bank account and pretty much the same old life that you started out with.

For Ellie, this includes a husband, Gerry (Stephen Rea of The Crying Game), a town planner engaged in a flirtation with a co-worker but too vague, wry and discontented with life to do anything conclusive about it or anything else; one female friend who is enviably up and abustle, another who is distressingly down and out, rendered dysfunctional by divorce; a part-time job in a bookstore and a full-time dream of becoming a writer herself.

It is, perversely, the movie's only thoroughly bad person, one Howard Spink (Philip Jackson), who more or less mobilizes everyone. He purports to be a construction consultant, and it's he who arranges the contractors for the job on the bathroom. They are the Nunn Brothers, and since they are identical twins (both played by Phil Daniels), they add immeasurably to the confusion in the McAllister household. Along the way Spink seduces the more vulnerable of Ellie's friends (she even supplies him with the change he needs to buy the requisite condom), cheats the Nunns, presents an exorbitant bill for his nonexistent services. In the end he flees everyone's wrath as he gathers up his family in order to escape an eviction notice on his own house.

None of this is presented melodramatically. Bad Behaviour was improvised, under Les Blair's direction, by its actors. They were obviously looking for characters to play, not a plot to follow or pre-existent outlines to fill in. For a change, this dangerous technique works: the film's best quality is its lifelike drift. Like real people, and unlike movie people, these figures will do anything to escape confrontation with their problems, with themselves.

By the end, Gerry seems a little more engaged in family life and Ellie is actually writing something. But we can be pretty certain that distraction will reassert itself, probably sooner rather than later. Anyway, it would betray the film's spirit if everyone suddenly started tidying things up for a thumping conclusion. The theaters are full of such endings anyway. What's always in short supply are movies that have something to do with life as most of us actually experience it. Bad Behaviour briefly, smartly fills that gap.