The great pleasure of Luciano Podcaminsky’s eccentric fantasy travelogue is its refusal to be bound by commonly accepted rules of genre. And indeed, why shouldn’t Super 8 documentary footage be presented as in illustration of a fictionalised monologue? Why shouldn’t the protagonist of said fiction be a bushy-bearded oddball speaking very broken English? Why shouldn’t a forthrightly funny film also embrace philosophical conjecture? For philosophical is what you become, it seems, if, like our protagonist, you suddenly disappear from view part-way into a pleasant night out with a new romantic interest...

In presenting the impossible testimony of an engagingly out-there fictional character in a low-key documentary style, The Third Pint recalls Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder, but another significant antecedent is Patrick Keiller’s exquisite semi-documentary works London and Robinson in Space, in which the thoughts and impressions of a couple of unseen, curmudgeonly observers overlay images of England and its institutions at rest and play. The protagonist of The Third Pint travels further. Having vanished in London (whereupon, as we learn from one of the film’s priceless deadpan asides, his poor date went mad), he visits Monaco, Cannes, New York and Amsterdam. In the process, he becomes more introspective, and unavoidably more inclined to observe humanity at an objective distance – which in turn makes him more spiritual and grandiose in his thinking, an indication, perhaps, that full engagement with life is always something of a bar to understanding it.

Yet in spite of its tender, pensive leanings, there’s also plenty of purely silly fun to be had with this unclassifiable, unforgettable film: a prominent and multi-award-winning commercials director, Podcaminsky has an effortlessly amusing turn of phrase and a killer eye for a memorable image.