The first thing to know about Zonad (2009), an off-the-wall Irish comedy, is that co-director John Carney made the successful 2006 romantic comedy-drama Once, about love and busking. The second thing to know is that Zonad is nothing like Once. It's a deadpan spoof, a 1950s sci-fi parody crossed with Father Knows Best and drenched in Irish stereotypes. It dispenses with logic in the hope that viewers will laugh at the outlandishness.
Two small-time criminals have fled a rural Irish rehab centre during a masquerade party. One of them, Liam (Simon Delaney), dressed in a red plastic suit and wearing a space helmet, reaches the hamlet of Ballymoran, breaks into a house, drinks all the liquor and passes out.
The Cassidy family returns from a spot of comet-watching to find Liam sprawled on the floor. The father immediately assumes he is a visitor from outer space. ("Can you think of another explanation?")
Liam, hearing the discussion, decides to play along. He introduces himself as Zonad and adopts a North American accent, which is sufficient to pass for alien. He makes himself at home, rudely trading on the Cassidys' unstinting hospitality. And he can't help noticing nubile daughter Jenny (a marvellous Janice Byrne, resembling a young Rosanna Arquette), who, as she has tried to make clear to her clueless boyfriend, is keen to hop into bed. Or a car. Or anything, really.
John and his brother Kieran Carney, who collaborated on Zonad, wanted to exaggerate the hackneyed view of the Irish as leprechaun-lovers who live in the pub and dance jigs all day. They wanted to play off the plots of mid-century TV shows ( The Twilight Zone) and movies ( The Day the Earth Stood Still) in which an otherworldly stranger comes to town and changes everyone's life. And they sought to channel the spirit of Mel Brooks.
The villagers all immediately accept that Zonad is who he says he is. The pub owner gives him free drinks. The one-man police force beats up anyone who looks the wrong way at the visitor. Life goes merrily on, until the other escapee shows up and sparks an exercise in alien one-upmanship, the funniest part of the film.
It's not easy to sustain the tone needed for this sort of outing: villagers who are naive without being stupid, a central figure who can act broadly without going too far, plot developments that provide welcome twists without breaking the mood. In a couple of scenes, the writer-directors veer too radically from the essential playfulness of the film - the police officer's behaviour is imported from some edgier gross-out comedy - but for the most part the bubble remains intact.
The Carneys wrote the story a decade ago, and turned it into an unreleased short in 2003 co-starring an old friend, Cillian Murphy. (Alas, the short isn't included on the DVD.) When the feature was released in Ireland last year, after a film-festival premiere in 2009, the reception was lukewarm.
The movie fared better at international festivals (Shanghai, Tribeca in New York) and secured international distribution at Cannes. It may, as John Carney has said, work best as a slow builder, the kind of cult favourite that friends tell friends about. He says he wouldn't mind that at all.
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