Lawless Heart (18) <br></br>Birthday Girl (15)

Seduced by a nice girl with a sticky past

The trouble with British cinema, it's sometimes said, is that our film-makers set their sights too low, too drab. Why can't we have a little glamour, the refrain goes – do it like they do in Hollywood? But in reality, that's the very problem – the feverish insistence on persuading us that we're having a good time. Most current British cinema is pathologically intent on denying drabness and the everyday – it's forever holding a glitter gun to our head, coercing us into being amused.

A welcome exception, a film only too happy to look mundanity in the face, is Lawless Heart, a low-budget second feature by Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger. In the opening moments, you think you know exactly what you're going to get – guests at a funeral reception mull over past and present, wax lugubrious. The initially prosaic look (which very quickly warms up) reminds you of a TV film, early Eighties vintage perhaps: you expect staid, small-time social comedy. But Lawless Heart is the archetypal sleeper film – go along with it and its scrupulously undemonstrative slow-burn tactics prove smart and very seductive.

The characters are loosely connected, youngish to middle-aged people in Maldon, Essex – the sort of quiet seaside town where everyone ends up either eating in or working at the same semi-posh restaurant. The bereaved boyfriend Nick (Tom Hollander) is keeping on his lover Stuart's restaurant, but hoping to escape, while Stuart's sister Judy (Ellie Haddington) needs her brother's money to maintain the farm she runs with her husband Dan (Bill Nighy). Three interlocking stories, each starting at the funeral, follow the fates of everyone in this cramped biosphere. Dan takes a nervous shine to a glamorous French florist (Clémentine Célarié); Nick finds himself unexpectedly entangled with the wayward Charlie (Sukie Smith), who attaches herself to him like a garrulous barnacle; wideboy Tim (Douglas Henshall), back in town after years travelling, falls for Leah (Josephine Butler), a nice girl with a sticky past.

Desire leads everyone to places they couldn't imagine going: the stuffy middle-aged husband yearns for a bit of French romance but settles for something less fancy; a melancholic gay man takes to a woman who seems to be an abrasive nightmare. Opposites attract, love lays traps for everyone: nothing new there, yet familiarity is one of the film's trump cards. Lawless Heart reminds you that stock situations really do occur in life with crashing regularity, and is very adept at evoking those teeth-grinding been-there moments: someone playing music too loud at night, or walking off with your coat at a party. Yet the film is wholly free of sitcom artifice, of those gratifying embarrassments that current British comedies crank out to order, such as the school-concert climax of About a Boy.

Where Lawless Heart is contrived, and brilliantly so, is in the cross-references between stories, feeding us little clues about situations, building the connections till we know this world inside out. The running gags about objects that pass from hand to hand are threaded through with the meticulousness of a whodunnit. What seems a loose, almost floppy narrative turns out to be tightly structured, signposted by the movements of a corkscrew, a coconut, a spotted scarf. Hunter and Hunsinger replay the same scenes, but with subtle variations: a row between two characters repeats itself and you suddenly realise there was a third person present all along. Sometimes the effect is of a slow-burning gag. At one point, Nick angrily kicks a bowl of sugar around his kitchen floor; later, Tim takes a brief puzzled look, then helps himself to a spoonful.

This intricate cleverness (the slightest whiff of Alan Ayckbourn) doesn't constrict the film, just gives support to its deceptively casual feel. The execution, and especially the acting, simply breathe more than is usual in British films. You believe in these characters, who aren't entirely untainted by stereotype – Henshall's indefatigably up-for-it prodigal, Smith's feckless motormouth – but strike you as individuals living up to the roles other people expect them to play. This is a consistently persuasive cast: vulnerable, pensive Hollander; Henshall laying on a broad sweep of lizard charm, then getting tender when we least expect it; and Nighy creating a self-absorbed, hidebound homophobe, muttering about "batting for the other team" through a ventriloquist's frozen lips, yet making his character improbably lovable. The best performance is daringly self-effacing: Ellie Haddington's Judy, all bruised, weary sulkiness, highlighting the sense that many of these characters are children who have grown up confused and wrung-out. A rare British version of that US indie-film standard, the small-town drama, Lawless Heart is a local movie, if you like, with all the realness and charm that suggests.

A more usual British film, drowning in forced jollity, is Birthday Girl, the second feature from precocious playwright-turned-director Jez Butterworth. His adaptation of his own Mojo got an unfairly sour reception, but given that film's dark perversity, it's amazing how mainstream Birthday Girl is. It's a St Albans Something Wild: John, a lonely, strait-laced bank clerk (a personable Ben Chaplin), sends for a Russian internet-order bride (Nicole Kidman), then discovers she comes as part of a package with her shady "cousins" – French actors Vincent Cassel and an underused Mathieu Kassovitz, who look the part in their sub-Versace shirts but sound about as Russian as Ronaldinho.

There's enough to be going on with here for a nice juicy uneasy situation, but the expected sense of menace never materialises – you'd think Butterworth would have learned something from his mentor Harold Pinter. Instead, the film quickly hits the farce button – John is blackmailed into pulling a bank job, then the characters chase each other along Hertfordshire's leafy highways and in and out of hotel rooms. There are some smart things: the co-writing Butterworth brothers, Jez and Tom, have fun with a bank staff-appraisal report as character description. But the whole thing is drowning in movie rhetoric – light funk soundtrack, incongruously romantic photography – reminding us to enjoy ourselves. Kidman proves she's willing to let her hair down and look grubby and cheap, but there's something a little hard-nosed in her determination to play against type, and after a while the usual breathy pertness emerges.

The film may conceivably have started out lampooning British fears and fantasies, but ultimately the joke is that women and foreigners are a jolly tricky lot. Worst of all, though, is the recycling of that currently prevalent Brit stereotype, the saddo protagonist: the sort of part where a bad haircut and a Terylene shirt do the work of characterisation.

j.romney@independent.co.uk