Feature | Lights, Camera, Action! – Powder Room

Powder Room (UK Rating: 15)

This particular ladies' room is in a London night club where Sam (Sheridan Smith) has met up with an old friend who has just returned from Paris, with a new, supercilious friend (Game of Thrones' Oona Chaplin) in tow. At the same time, Sam's other, more raucous, friends turn up for a night out. With her life at a low ebb - no boyfriend, no career and little in the way of a future - she is desperate to create the right impression with the Parisian pair. That means lying about herself and keeping the two groups of friends well apart.

Based on Rachel Hiron's play, When Women Wee, this is a film made by a woman and starring women (there are a handful of token men). However, is it just for a female audience? Delaney says not, and that she knows men who have seen the original play and enjoyed it immensely.

While the ladies' room is central to the story, it's also a device to allow the characters to talk to each other and move the plot forward - the chances of that on the dance floor are zilch. It betrays the film's theatrical origins, and this is strained at times by the amount of action that actually takes place in there. Even the few scenes that take place outside the club can't take the focus away from the ladies' loo.

It's the cast, jam-packed with up-coming British acting talent, which buoys the viewer along, helping to accept the contrivance. Smith, Chaplin, Jaime Winstone and Kate Nash bring energy and conviction to their roles, with Winstone adding a real earthiness to the brassy Chanel, complete with bleached blonde hair and bondage shorts. She's Smith's best friend - and has to be kept away from the Parisian duo at all costs.

The ladies' room at this particular club has one very colourful thing going for it - an attendant in the shape of Johnnie Fiori, in her flamboyant African headdress. For over half of the film she doesn't speak, but her face shouts her disapproval of the behaviour she sees in her domain. In the later stages of the film, she acquires a voice and proves to be more than amusingly disdainful: she's compassionate and practical. She's a wonderful counterbalance to all the mayhem going on in front of her.

Powder Room is a comedy, but there aren't many laugh-out-loud moments. Smiles, yes, and some giggles, mainly caused by the attendant's disapproval. While this may have something to do with the men in the audience not always getting the joke, it's more likely to be because of the vein of sadness that runs through the film. It isn't just Sam who is unhappy with her life: all the girls are, in one way or another, despite putting up a front of happiness and success. They are all desperate to have a good time in the shabby club and each one of them fails.

6/10

Good

Brash, noisy and energetic, Powder Room is a promising debut from M. J. Delaney. It's a film that the younger women in the audience will recognise immediately, that the men will find baffling - and that will make the older ladies in the audience feel mightily relieved that their clubbing days are over.

Powder Room is released in UK cinemas on Friday, 6th December.