AFTER six years of marriage, Jesse (Andy Samberg) and Celeste (Rashida Jones) have divorced but remain “best friends”, living in adjacent houses and sharing out-of-office time. Which is easy for Jesse, who’s been unemployed for years, less so for Celeste, a high-flyer in a Los Angeles marketing consultancy.

Director Lee Toland Krieger’s film doesn’t rush to tell us where its yuppie pathway is taking us. Knowing that Rashida Jones also wrote the screenplay may help you understand the reason. As the story unfolds among parties, office politics, dates, friends gobsmacked by the divorce and its aftermath, we realise that she has written a character for herself that sucks the narrative into Celeste’s aura and drains it of reasons for us to sympathise with her.

It takes courage to write a film and play its leading character who epitomises self-interest and defies all our best efforts to discover in her something to find admirable.

This, not surprisingly, gives cred to Jesse’s efforts to strike out alone in search of independence from the residues of a cloying relationship.

Why should we care what happens to these two people, neither of whom has much to offer? The answer bespeaks Jones’s skill in designing a screenplay that deliberately confronts both those parameters and tells us to search our own souls less for explanation than simply for understanding of the film’s purpose. Jones merits admiration for how she has laid out characters, relationships, conflicts, tensions, satisfactions, concerns, frustrations and social statements, for us to make of them what we will and leave with not happy-ever-after feel-good, but a sense of cautious optimism.

At Dendy