Giles De'Ath (John Hurt) is a reclusive man-of-letters, his life dedicated to the acclaimed literary novels that line his shelves. An "erstwhile fogey, now cult", he lives at odds with the times, doesn't own a television set and no longer visits the cinema. Except once, locked out of home and caught in a rain storm. Only Giles De'Ath stumbles into the wrong screen and instead of E.M. Forster feasts himself on raucous US teen comedy Hotpants College II. And sees, for the first time, Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestly).

The first but hardly the last, because that bland, ineffectual heart-throb captivates this fiftysomething widower and his life becomes a secretive whirl of teen girl magazines and those new-fangled videocassette things, all in dedicated pursuit of the gloriously inept object of his affections. And when, fortuitously, his agent suggests a holiday, De'Ath seizes the bull by the horns and jets off to Chesterton, Long Island, home to the star of Skid Marks and Tex Mex.

Accomplished TV director Richard Kwietniowski's feature debut, adapted from the slim novel by Gilbert Adair, is an effortlessly knowing take on both Thomas Mann and Nabokov. On Long Island, after the author's bumbling detection, De'Ath affects a meeting between himself and Ronnie through the latter's girlfriend Audrey (the excellent Fiona Loewi, fulfilling the mother's role from Lolita). The three become good friends, but the time inevitably comes when the novelist must reveal his true intentions.

It's an actor's piece then and Kwietniowski could scarcely be better served by Hurt, here at the top of his game. This is not a film about an ageing man's coming out, and one wonders what, if anything, De'Ath would actually do if Ronnie were to reciprocate. Hurt's is a touching turn as the repressed intellectual able to put his mind to justifying -- even deceiving -- himself. And Beverly Hills 90210 star Priestly is a minor revelation as Ronnie, playing him for dumb but not stupid, managing to pitch Bostock's DTV epics and trash sitcoms just the right side of parody. The film only wrongfoots itself by having the Porkys-ish Hotpants play in a cinema -- that's video fodder at best these days.

Otherwise, this is film in which detail is all, from the Faber and Faber spines of De'Ath's novels, to the Hotpants review in Sight and Sound ("puerile romp without a single redeeming feature"), and the splendid Maury Chaykin's vaguely pretentious Long Island diner, Chez d'Irv. Being an English writer with a cut-glass accent in this neck of the woods clearly carries a certain frisson.

Love and Death on Long Island never looks to over-play its hand and so ends up a witty, intelligent and, above all, civilised comedy of manners and conventions. And the end, when motives are laid bare, is underlined with such subtle understatement that it allows all involved to retain their dignity without selling the film short. A delight.