Shopping late at night Shawn, Vincent, Lenny and their girlfriend Jodie work the night shift and sleep during the day. One works as a nurse in a hospital, the other as an operator at a telephone exchange, the third places goods in a store, the fourth assembles chips on the conveyor. From time to time, they meet and chat in cafes, where they learn about each other’s problems. A girlfriend has left Sean, Lenny is afraid to make a date for a girl she knows, and Jody can’t admit that she was recently fired from her job. They have fun watching Vincent, who with varying success manages to flirt with local beauties.
It seems that the lives of four friends in the foreseeable future are not expected to change. From the realization of this terrible fact, representatives of another lost generation begin to reflect and ask the insoluble question: what are we living for? However, each of them has its own specific expression: “For two years I sit in front of the girl and do not even know her name, and this is despite the fact that our service is responsible for communication!” And so on and so forth. Salvation from social and domestic predestination is seen by them in the arrangement of their personal lives, but here they are waiting for one problem after another.
For example, an attendant cannot tell whether his girlfriend, who works during the day, is still living with him, because when he comes from work, she is no longer there, and when he leaves, she is not yet. Then the young man finds a way to track it with a piece of soap, the size of which is measured daily. The communications operator is hampered by his own journalistic past: once he worked in a magazine for men and was engaged in the fact that he daily invented and wrote obscene revelations on behalf of readers, and now suffers from the resulting “pornorreaction” – sees every woman as a whore.
Young director Saul Metzstein gives this film a head start to many American youth hits, because he feels much better the style, rhythm and problems of modern youth, who, as it turns out, quite early begins to suffer because of life predestination and unwillingness to put up with it. In part, the film echoes another sleazy British comedy “Breakaway!”, which appeared a year earlier. There, the heroes saw only one way out - in drugs, and consumed them constantly in unlimited quantities.
This picture turned out to be much softer and more charming: the director is attentive to the sweetest everyday things and clearly sympathizes with his heroes. In the period of the change of millennia, the British, like no one, managed a movie about the lives of small secondary people, seemingly ordinary representatives of the crowd, not belonging to successful strata of society. However, from these pictures one could see that social outsiders in England did not lose their sense of humor and did not feel like some kind of flawed creatures.
