Wearing its jumble of styles defiantly on its sleeve, Julien Kemp’s romantic comedy spares no imaginative expense in pursuing a visual replication of the documentary/scientific/autobiographical/fictional meld that characterises its source text, Alain de Botton’s novel Essays in Love. The budget may have been smaller than the ambition at play here, but the film’s cheerful mix of Michel Gondry-style visual experimentation with a High Fidelity-style effort to give the male perspective on love makes for a hugely likeable and engaging new take on the romcom – and a low-budget film that sees no necessity to cloak itself in murky social realism. Rather, with its dry humour, lo-fi special effects and quirkily obsessive analyses of everyday phenomena, Kemp’s film rather resembles The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and takes on an explanatory remit only slightly less daunting. On the verge of suicide, a young man, Duncan (Brendan Patricks), gropes for some meaningful assessment of the demoralising and emasculating events that have led him to this desperate pass – his experiences, in other words, with women. Did a grand universal plan lie behind his apparently random meeting with dizzy Wendy (Kelly Adams)? Just why did she keep shuttling between him and her ex? Why did Duncan then keep switching personalities to please gorgeous Olive (Jane March)? And why was it so necessary for him to be straight with Rhona (Cécile Cassel) concerning what he thought of her new shoes, thus hurting her feelings and ultimately killing off the relationship? Duncan’s meanderings through his own fraught romantic past are given entertaining visual form by way of the extended metaphor of a fairground, with his time in each woman’s world illustrated by a rollercoaster ride. Elsewhere, animated sequences, special guest appearances (by, for instance, Johnny Ball, calculating the probability of a particular meeting) and sudden interjections by inanimate objects give idiosyncratic expression to Duncan’s somewhat obsessive mindset. If his niggling self-absorbtion might make it only too apparent why most of his relationships crash and burn, his journey to greater self-knowledge is both endearing and instructive; and the film’s analysis of all the commonplace hypocrisies, contradictions, booby traps and confidence tricks encountered in dating will yield no shortage of sighs of recognition.