Film review: Not Another Happy Ending offers a very different vision of Glasgow

John McKay, 98mins. Starring: Karen Gillan, Stanley Weber, Kate Dickie (12A)

This breezy Glasgow-set romantic comedy offers a very different vision of the city than that found in the many dour "hard man" films made in the city over the years. Its protagonists are cappuccino sipping authors and publishers.

The director John McKay emphasises the quirkiness rather than the angst of his characters. He also strikes a very brisk narrative tempo, as if terrified that if the film slows down, the flimsiness of the narrative conceit will become apparent.

Karen Gillan (from Doctor Who) plays Jane Lockhart, a struggling novelist whose first book is championed by Tom Duval (Stanley Weber), a handsome, irascible, proud and extremely snobbish French publisher.

The book is a success but Jane is so happy with life that she develops writer's block and can't finish its successor. That's why Tom needs to make her miserable. The dialogue isn't as witty as it needs to be to keep such a stylised affair afloat. Gillan, though, is very engaging as the distracted, Annie Hall-like heroine.