Irina Palm review

One of the year's most bizarre offerings is Irina Palm in which - and there's no easy way of putting this - Marianne Faithfull stars as a champion masturbator who becomes the unlikely handjob queen of the Soho sex scene. It's a highly spurious premise for a very uneven film which raises far more unintentional laughs than it would like to.

Faithfull is Maggie, a 50-something self-confessed frump from the suburbs who is desperate to help her young grandson recover from a life-threatening illness. In order to do this she needs to come up with several thousand pounds to fund a trip to Australia for specialist treatment.

After what seems like very little effort to get a job or raise money in a conventional manner, Maggie passes a sex emporium in Soho advertising for a 'hostess'. She is given a trial in their 'glory hole' room - men stick their appendages through a hole in the wall and she relieves them. Lo and behold that in spite of her advancing years it turns out she has skin so soft and a technique so amazing that soon enough men are queuing around the block to have their members manipulated by her. Not only that, but she is given her own nickname and a mini-gang war breaks out to acquire her services.

There are so many things wrong with this curious and preposterous European co-production that it is difficult to know where to begin. The script is clunky, full of terrible lines ('He's dying, I'm wanking. it's a mess'); the plot often defies belief (the way in which Maggie acts with her family and friends is simply ridiculous) and the direction is flat and pretentious (nearly every scene ends in a blackout).

Worst of all though is Faithfull's performance which derives from the startled rabbit school of acting. If there was a UK razzie ceremony she would be odds-on for the Worst Actress prize. Her wanking widow has only one expression and a monotonous, stilted delivery and quite how she passed the audition is a mystery.

I was prepared to excuse quite a lot of this on the assumption that it was the work of a first-time young director, but I discovered that the actual auteur is a 59-year-old by the name of Sam Gabarski, with a number of shorts and a previous feature to his name. His inane efforts at some sort of social realism do not mark him out as the new Mike Leigh. A staggering achievement - but for all the wrong reasons.

Paul Hurley