Considering his feature debut was a dour tale of sexual jealousy and murder, "About Adam" marks a radical change of pace for Irish film maker Gerard Stembridge. Or more accurately his first film, "Guiltrip", was the really shocking film to have made for a man better known for comedy in the theatre and on radio.
Yet the risquΓ© romantic comedy of "About Adam" is still a very challenging piece of work, not least for the sexual ambiguities in its story of a man (Stuart Townsend) who beds three daughters of a middle class Dublin family while engaged to the youngest. If Stembridge was expecting a backlash from the morally outraged, Stembridge has been pleasantly surprised.
"I think the film company were prepared for a backlash of sorts," he explains. "You can tell when they asked their questions at the screenings. But the surprising thing was that it scarcely registered as an issue at the US screenings. If it had been, I would've been very prepared for it because the whole point was to say to cinema audiences that romantic comedy has been defiled for the last few years. That kind of moral world has been narrowed to the point where romantic comedies are really only for kids."
"They're not for adult minds to deal with anymore, and it's always seemed to me that if you look back much further into the history of cinema, to old screwball comedies, you had a much more edgy, much more interesting and ambivalent moral world at work. The relationships with people were far more adult. To me "About Adam" was just a small little nod in the direction of the adult world really, and the trick the film tries to employ - much like Adam does in the story - is to say 'I bet I can charm you with this.' "
