Director Rose Troche followed up her acclaimed indie Go Fish, with British production Bedrooms and Hallways, about London roommates Leo, Darren and Angie. While Darren has a turbulent sexual affair going with his real estate agent, Leo joins a new age mensgroup and soon falls for straight member Brendan. Brendan has recently broken up with Sally, who just happens to be Leo’s childhood sweetheart. What follows is much more than a romcom: it is an intelligent take on love, relationships, sexual orientation, friendship and the urban family and how and why we love who we love.

The Bedrooms and Hallways plot is rather dependent on coincidences, but that’s fine, really. It is a well written piece, full of gentle humour and funny dialogue, but also a fair bit of romance. Not the epic ‘sweep you off your feet’ Brokeback Mountain kind of love, but rather a more lifelike version. I’ve heard Bedrooms and Hallways described as “a gay-friendly Friends” and that is not an entirely undeserved comment. Where Friends goes for the all-out laugh, Bedrooms and Hallways aims more for the benign chuckle, but its portrayal of people is fairly similar. The Bedrooms and Hallways characters live in the same kind of exaggerated reality. It is life (and love) as we know it, but embellished for artistic purposes.

Despite a rather impressive cast (Kevin McKidd, Tom Hollander, Simon Callow, Hugo Weaving, Jennifer Ehle, James Purefoy and Hariet Walter). Bedrooms and Hallways can be considered a ‘small’ movie. However it does pay a lot of attention to detail, particularly where the costumes and production design are involved. Leo’s dream sequences are well-executed (and very funny) in their surrealism. The houses featuring in this film (including the one where our three friends live) are full of stuff that adds texture to its inhabitants, and the costumes are meticulously chosen. Angie and particularly Darren are outrageously dressed, Sally’s character development can be monitored through the amount of blue she is wearing and one of the supporting castmember’s coming out is a as much about items of clothing as it is about sexual experiences.

Kevin McKidd is adorable as sweet but neurotic Leo, a man thinking everything he feels to death and rationalising himself into isolation. Tom Hollander as Darren and Julie Graham as Angie are his exuberant counterparts. The three form a family unit that has nothing to do with genetic bonds, but is just as sincere and genuine as its biological equivalent. James Purefoy satisfies as hunky Brendan and his chemistry with McKidd (as the more recent Rome has reaffirmed) is great. Jennifer Ehle’s charm does not fail her, her portrayal as Sally, the woman caught in the middle, is endearing as well as sympathetically strong. But absolute scene stealers are Harriet Walter and Simon Callow, as the new-age couple. Notwithstanding their efforts to spiritually enlighten everybody around them, these two are a vile pair of passive aggressive spouses. Their encounters are hysterical.

Overall, the scenes that take place in the men’s group are the most outright hilarious moments in the film. There is something inherently sad about a bunch of modern men, stripping and dancing around a campfire while banging a tribal drum. About as sad as a 65-year old guy with a comb-over in a Porsche convertible, I would say. The new-age group sessions are full of satire on that lifestyle: rather than actually seeking enlightenment, modern man/woman seems content to use new age as a crutch: they babble a bit while holding “the stone of truth” or the “harpoon of strength” or spontaneously rebirth themselves. The superficiality and poignancy of the group sessions often had me in stitches.

Though some may argue that Bedrooms and Hallways pussyfoots around too much, to me this is in fact the strength of the film. Very few relationships are clean cut, most people just blunder about until they coincidentally get it right, and for a lot of us there may very well not be such a thing as completely gay or completely straight. I am a profound believer in the ‘blue dot’-theory, as advocated by Rita Mae Brown: If tomorrow morning, all people would feature a dot on their foreheads in various shades of blue, where completely straight would be light blue (almost white) and completely gay would be dark blue (almost black), 80% of people would probably not show up for work that morning, and would have to re-examine what they always believed was their sexual orientation.

Bedrooms and Hallways gently brings the point across that every individual can only live and love as is right for them, that there are no rules for who you are attracted to, nor should there be, and that the direction your (love)life takes can never truly be predicted. The fact that it manages to teach us a profound lesson while making us smile, only adds to its appeal. A delightful and intelligent movie.