An Everlasting Piece

In a Belfast torn by sectarian violence in the mid 1980s, two barbers, one a Protestant (Brian F. O'Byrne), the other a Catholic (Barry McEvoy), team up to corner the toupee market in Northern Ireland. They have until midnight on Christmas Eve to conduct more hairpiece transactions than their rivals, Toupee or Not Toupee. If they win, they'll be awarded the franchised monopoly that the previous proprietor (Billy Connolly) vacated when he went insane and scalped a few customers.

If the concept of a film about hairpiece salesmen sifting for bald clientele amid a bloody conflict strikes you as odd, so did the idea that a president might start a war to cover up a scandal before Barry Levinson gave us Wag the Dog a few years back. His An Everlasting Piece might not be so prescient, but like fellow pond hoppers Billy Elliot and Brassed Off, it unfurls with working-class aplomb: gritty, bittersweet, and intermittently uproarious. The interplay between McEvoy's hotheaded reactionary and O'Byrne's amiable lunk also goes a long way, but the story line, penned by McEvoy, wears thin as it ping-pongs coiffeurs between the IRA and the British Army. At the Harvard Square and in the suburbs.

-- Tom Meek