Frank and Percy Review: McKellen and Alam's Bromance for Guard Dogs Becomes a Romance Novel

The London Film Festival: McKellen and Alam reprise their roles for the film version of Ben and Driel, a bittersweet star-studded comedy about finding love later in life. This silver-years romance carries a gentle sweetness of new experiences and fresh ideas, along with sentimental charm, an autumnal character, and a glimpse of how a wooden wind settles over us. An all-star gallery of supportive turns. Sometimes this work does

There's a subtle sweetness to this Silver Years romance of new experiences and new ideas—as well as sweet sentiments, autumnal woodwind music that tells us how to feel, and a bit of comedic-cartoonish characterization in an all-star gallery of supporting turns. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But the film's good nature wins out – and there's a wonderful contribution from Joanna Lumley, as Belinda, a beautiful woman who tragically suffers from early-onset dementia. Screenwriter Martin Sherman adapts Ben Weatherill's two-hander, which originally starred Roger Allm and Ian McKellen. They return here for an expanded theatrical version, with Sean Mathias once again directing.

Allam plays Frank, a retired history teacher whose wife died of cancer a few years ago (Belinda is his sister-in-law) and now likes to walk his dog Taffy on Hampstead Heath. McClellan Percy is an academic sociologist and climate scientist who can also be found there with his dog Bruno. Percy is bitterly separated from his ex-partner.

Men are lonely in their own different ways. Frank has nothing to do but hang around the garden center, reminisce about his marriage, and volunteer at a charity shop where he has to stop, and Derek Jacobi, as a salaried employee, is allowed to hang out. Percy looks for age-gap dates on a certain website called Search Papa - a couple of wide-ranging comedies here for Enkoti Gatwa and Hugh Skinner - but he's not satisfied. His friendship with Frank deepens, his wry sense of fun unexpectedly meshing with Frank's northern common sense. Then one day over a drink, Percy asks her if it would be okay if she kissed Frank. Amazingly, Frank agrees - and this is the start of something new. "When I removed the cataract, I felt it," he says.

It makes Frank wonder if he's bisexual—but maybe more so that he's just sexual, in a way he never expected to be at this time in his life, or any time in his life, and could only be with this person. We get some bittersweet comedy when Frank and Percy realize that their social lives include funerals, and Percy has a wonderfully eureka moment looking at the gravestones in the churchyard. "Oh my god! I had him!"

Naturally, the path to true love, or any kind of love, is not without problems, and at one point Belinda, in a moment of clarity, tells Frank, "How lucky you are to have a broken heart at 77!" True enough. It is a love story that is as comforting as the cups of tea and pieces of cake that the characters are indifferent to.

Frank and Percy premiered at the London Film Festival.