A sort of Day For Night on ice, Belgian cult novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Ice Rink is a breezy, affectionate homage to the slapstick one-reelers of the silent era, with little more on its mind than lacing skates on an international cast and watching it stumble around for 80 minutes. It's a workable conceit, simple enough at the start to snowball into inspired anarchy, but Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd have been declared comic masters with good reason: Mastering their choreography was never as easy as it looked. Tom Novembre plays Toussaint's alter ego, a pretentious French director filming a misbegotten hockey romance as "a metaphor for Europe's predicament." Rushed to meet the deadline for the Venice Film Festival, Novembre haplessly orchestrates a self-absorbed American actor (The Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell), an amorous leading lady (Dolores Chaplin, Charlie's granddaughter), an excitable Lithuanian hockey team, and a crew of varying skating dexterity. These would appear to be the ingredients for a fine screwball farce, but Toussaint has trouble stringing his pratfalls and reflexive gags into anything more than intermittently clever. The movie-within-a-movie looks promisingly awful, but it's never explored to much effect. Neither is the ebullient Chaplin, whose lineage alone opens up great possibilities. The film displays flashes of what might have been—Campbell's hilariously nonplussed turn, Novembre trying to explain Bresson's "Notes On Film" to non-French-speaking Lithuanian jocks, dolly grips at the mercy of a sliding camera—but The Ice Rink glides smoothly and quickly out of memory.