Fleapit revisited:The Ballad of Wallis Island.

"I waded in the silver sea. It knocked the breath right out of me. And I washed it away and saw the day" - The Silver Sea, McGwyer Mortimer 

What a lovely film The Ballad of Wallis Island is. Despite the incontestable fact some genuinely vile people are now in some of the world's most powerful positions I still retain faith in humanity. I still believe that the vast majority of people, complicated and frustrating as they can be, are good and that they mean well. You will witness one hundred acts of kindness for every act of cruelty you witness.

If you're starting to lose faith in humanity then James Griffiths' Ballad of Wallis Island is not a bad place to go to get some of it back. It tells the story of double lottery winner and now eccentric millionaire, perhaps billionaire, Charles Heath (Tim Key) who lives alone in a big house on the island where he plays pool, swingball, and tennis with himself and listens to the old McGwyer Mortimer records he used to enjoy with his now deceased partner Marie.

He loves the folk duo McGwyer Mortimer so much that he has invited Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden), and paid him a very handsome fee, to the island to play a gig to an audience of "less than one hundred". What Charles hasn't told Herb is just how much less than one hundred that audience will be. He also hasn't told him that he has invited Herb's former musical, and romantic, partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) to the island to perform with him.

It's clear, from the off, that there is some degree of tension, resentment even, that still lingers between the former couple. Even if Nell arrives with her husband, the Portland puffin fancier Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). Michael is kind and good natured but he's not the fool that Herb takes him for. Does Herb still love Nell? Does Nell still love Herb? What caused their break up in the first place? Will we even find out?

And what of Charles? What's his intentions? Does he just want them to play their old songs together again or he is playing cupid? Charles's conversation is littered with puns. Some of them are amusing and some of them would get pretty annoying after a while (Herb certainly finds that to be the case) but it seems the constant punning and his jocular nature are not so much a smokescreen as a defence mechanism.

Charles has a heart of gold but will local shop owner, and object of Charles's affection, Amanda (Sian Clifford) see that or will she just see a rather gauche man with strange clothes and an interest in halibut. Amanda never seems to have any other customers and it's not clear who else actually lives on the desolate, yet ruggedly beautiful, island.

There's not a lot of characters in this film but that works in its favour and means we get to really know those that are. Nell is charitable, friendly, and has turned her back on folk music to make chutney. Herb is precious, aware that the new - commercial - music he is making doesn't have anything like the depth of the songs he wrote and performed with Nell yet there's something about him that means we still root for him.

As for Charles, he's the biggest enigma of all but there's something incredibly endearing about his hospitality and his open nature. Even if the guest bedroom has a tap that constantly flows and he can't even stay silent long enough to enjoy a beautiful sunset. Tim Key employs precision comic timing to deliver some brilliant lines. There's a couple that crop up in a conversation about the relationship between Gepetto and Pinocchio that had me, and everyone else in the Everyman cinema in Crystal Palace, laughing out loud.

The songs (performed by Basden and written by former Fridge member and post-rock/folktronica artist Adem Ilhan) are good. They're not so good that I would necessarily sit down and listen to them in their own right but in the context of the film they work fantastically well and one song, performed near the end - at a point of heightened emotion anyway, may just have had me wiping a tear from my eye.

When the camera cuts to Charles Heath watching Herb McGwyer sing it seems he's in a similar place. The Ballad of Wallis Island is a film about musicians moving on in life after their time in the spotlight but more than that it's about people negotiating their own emotions and learning to accept their limitations and the limitations of others. While at the same time it always remembers that people, other people, are what makes life worth living. If you allow people to show you their best side, more than often they will do just that.