The death of Stuart by drowning in a boating accident off the Isle of Man serves as a catalyst for emotional flipflops in Lawless Heart, a British film directed by Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger with the tagline “We think we live in a rational world . . . then we screw it up.” The principal characters arrive at Stuart’s wake, which begins the film. Several subsequent relationship paradoxes are explained when film footage goes back in time, including returns to the wake. Many surprises occur at mealtime in a Maldon, Essex, town restaurant, Stuart’s, which the dead man evidently owned. Although Stuart was the lover of Nick (played by Tom Hollander), the sympathy that he receives from Charlie (played by Sukie Smith) awakens his latent heterosexuality. Nick’s father Dan (played by Bill Nighy), the only homophobe in the film, meanwhile, carries on a flirtation with Corinne (played by Clémentine Célarié), the French woman who operates a florist shop around the corner from the restaurant, unbeknownst to his wife Judy (played by Ellie Haddinton), who becomes horny the very night after he engages in anonymous sex with an entirely different woman whom he picks up as she strolls down a street in town. Nevertheless, Dan articulates many eloquent questions in his conversations with Corinne; alas, there are no answers. Tim (played by Douglas Henshall) suddenly turns up at the wake after eight years away from Maldon. Stuart’s first lover, we are led to believe, Tim pursues Leah (played by Josephine Butler), who in turn recently broke up with his former buddy David (played by Stuart Laing). However, the jigsaw puzzle about relationships, solipsistically perceived in each segment of the film, turns out to be nothing but a soap opera when we realize that the only point of the story is that love-starved self-centered people who seem afraid or incapable of deep commitments, without understanding themselves, just as the filmmakers have pretended that life is a myopic transition from birth to death in a world that needs their help to overcome injustices of all sorts. MH