ROMANTIC COMEDY; 1hr 20min
STARRING: Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena
Duet: Treadaway and Tena
Mixing up the messy exuberance of T in the Park, Scotland’s hottest music festival, with the skinniest and happiest wisp of a plot, You Instead is a steadily cresting wave. The time-frame is 24 hours, the entire David Mackenzie-directed shoot took just five days, and the energy of the cast and the easy-going, immense crowd is unflagging as electro-pop sensation Adam (Treadaway) and grungy, post-punkette Morello (Tena) grow close while inadvertently handcuffed together. Hey, it’s a music festival.
Each has an all-wrong-for-them partner tagging along for some of the ride: his girl (Ruta Gedmintas) is a bratty model, her boy (Alastair Mackenzie) a too-straight banker — is there any other kind? While chilly day slides into even chillier night in a mud-crusted, what-the-hell haze of rock ’n’ roll and fairground rides, they all have no option but to go with the sort of spontaneous, boozy flow that only happens when you’re young and cool enough to carry it off. They are, and they do, in a free-flowing celebration of living extra-large.
