"Actor: Paul Push"

• Breathe Safely | DVD | (14/03/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £18.99

  In Breathe Safely, it's the year 2019 and cigarette smoking has been seriously outlawed: anyone found lighting up faces the death penalty. This is the sometime amusing premise of a film which turns anti-smoking into a combustible comedy set in a grey futuristic London with suspect air quality. The film opens with a man idly smoking in the Happy Health Restaurant while outside a sobbing woman in a phone box reports this heinous crime. Ultimately the smoker is attacked with water pistols (shooting anaesthetic) and subjected to a "medium to well-done" grilling. The hero, Detective Inspector Gym Fitt, is played by Paul Push who is also director, producer, costume designer, screenwriter, music producer and trainee (it's the first film he's made). In total he notches up 39 credits, a Guinness World Record. Gym Fitt, a leading light in the Air Intelligence Regiment (AIR), is heading Operation Cancer, which is on a mission to seek-and-destroy SCUM (Smokers' Cooperative of Underground Militants). More arrests are made including one of a woman who seduces men in hotel rooms with something more tantalising than sex: an illicit cigarette. Any contact with cigarette smoke entails the wearing of gas masks and ultimately leads to Gym developing asthma and resigning from the force to become an underwear model. Is Breathe Safely funny? To start with, yes, especially for fans of cheaply made, post-modern, post-ironic films. But it begins to pall towards the middle and by the end looks like Paul has pushed his luck a bit too far. Also included are outtakes from the movie, some funny, some not. --Joan Byrne