Peaches (Cert 15)

by ALEXANDER WALKER, Evening Standard

Peaches, written and directed by Nick Grosso from his Royal Court play, was shot partly in London.

But there must have been enough of it lensed in Ireland to allow it to qualify for that country's investors' tax breaks.

Which is about the only benefit it's picked up on the way to the screen.

At least Rod Stoneman's Bord Scannon na hEireann (Irish Film Board to us), which has had BBC Films often spending British licence payers' money generously on co-productions with it in Eire, is sending back a bit of the public loot across the Irish Sea - to Camden and Kentish Town, where a trio of oversexed slackers (Matthew Rhys,Justin Salinger, Matthew Dunster) are forever primping themselves in front of the mirror and gabbing to each other about their prowess (or the lack of it) with women.

Like most "relationship comedies", nothing happens,but everyone blarneys away till you wish they'd croak from exhaustion.

You'd need a calculator to total the number of times the F-word is used by these boorish would-be swingers.

On stage, structured as "black-out" vignettes about arrested adolescence, it may have just worked: on screen, it's a repetitive bore.

Matthew Rhys, as the one in the trio who can't get laid, amply demonstrates why.

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