Catherine McCormack as Hannah, in the immediate aftermath of her 37-minute marriage.

The Ballad of CAMDEN TOWN

In the late Middle Ages - the Age of Chivalry - there was a fashion for making maps that charted the path of True Love: maps that led through Deserts of Loneliness and Sloughs of Despair to Plains of Happiness (and sometimes Peaks of Bliss). We’re a bit more cynical these days, but you could still make up a kind of 20th-century ‘Atlas of Love’, the difference being that the course of true love would run differently in different cities. It might be edgy in New York, perverse in Madrid, complex in Paris, flamboyant in Berlin, crazy in London...

But the craziest map of all would belong to the trendy inner-city London enclave of Camden with its street markets and music venues, moneyed chic and artistic poverty, ethnic restaurants and canals.

Venice it ain’t, however, and This Year’s Love - the new British film set in Camden - is no Romeo and Juliet tale of romantic love tragically thwarted. Here, the lovers are not so much star-crossed as screwed up, and it’s confusion rather than tragedy that gets in the way of a happy ending.

All of the seven main characters in This Year’s Love are searching for happiness (aren’t we all?) and, in the process, drift in and out of relationships with one another over a three-year period. Like most of us, they get it wrong more often than they get it right, and happiness is the outcome in only just under half the cases.

The result is funny, but edgy-funny rather than funny-ha-ha. This Year’s Love starts with a rush to get to the church on time, but any similarity with Four Weddings and a Funeral stops there: the marriage in question - between Hannah and Danny - lasts just 37 minutes. It falls apart when Danny discovers who Hannah slept with last week (his Best Man), flings the wedding cake against the wall and storms out onto the street.

It is a high-energy opening, mixing comedy and emotional pain, paving the way for what will be a high-energy film. And much of that energy is drawn from the fact that the entire movie was shot on location last April - the coldest, wettest April for 100 years - in and around Camden.

"Camden is so funky, has some of the best clubs and hippest bands in London, and the market is incredibly flamboyant and colourful," says the film’s (American-born) producer, Michele Camarda. "We worked very hard to find locations that showed the distinctive personality of the area. Camden is a place where young, arty people live, and we’ve tried to celebrate it in the film in the way that New York film-makers celebrate Greenwich Village and Soho."

"Camden has an eclectic feel to it, like the film’s characters," says David Kane, who both wrote and directed This Year’s Love. "It’s like a village within London, and the fact that all the characters live there makes all the coincidences more believable."

But This Year’s Love is not about arty inner-London villages. It’s about people - seven of them: three guys and four girls. That should already tell you that the ending is not going to be entirely happy, because two into seven don’t go.