Lonely Hearts

As crankily bizarre in its own way as the later Man of Flowers, this is a sort of neo-realist comedy with a touch that Buster Keaton would have admired, not least the opening funeral sequence in which hearse and solitary mourner's car, befuddled by traffic lights, engage in a startled pas de deux of overtaking before settling down again in dignified procession. Pushing 50, alone for the first time with his mother now dead, Peter the piano-tuner (Kaye) is free at last to find out if there's life in the old dog yet. Splashing out on a new toupee, amusing himself by pretending to be blind as he goes about his work, he acquires a girl (Hughes) through a lonely-hearts agency, hesitantly suspecting that she may be rather too young but not that over-protective parents have induced in her a pathological fear of sex. Tenderly and wittily, Cox nurses their relationship along through assorted ups and downs, in particular their involvement in a production of Strindberg's The Father (a wickedly accurate satire of amateur dramatics). Beautifully observed and beautifully acted, it's a small gem.