Dir. Jackie Oudney, UK, 2008, 88 mins
Cast: Ann-Marie Duff, Hugh Bonneville, Eric Cantona
Review by Carol Allen
Despite it's ironic title, this film is very English, being about our fascination and suspicion as a nation with regard to the French expertise, when it comes to matters of love and romance. Do they really have all the answers?
The man asking the question is journalist Jed Winter (Bonneville), who is researching an interview he's about to do with auteur film maker Thierry Grimandi (Cantona), who appears to see himself as an authority on the nature of love. At first Jed thinks Thierry's views are all tosh, but when he hits problems with his long term girlfriend Cheryl (Victoria Hamilton), while at the same time his best friend Marcus (Douglas Henshall) seems to have become obsessed with the issue of relationships, Jed realises that this business of emotions is a lot more complicated than he thought, particularly when he finds himself attracted to Marcus's girlfriend Sophie (Duff).
This film is literate, witty, charming and directed with a nice light touch, which allows the actors to get on with presenting their characters, rather than having to fight their way through tricky camera work and special FX. It's also very well acted. Bonneville is a delightfully confused, cuddly and sympathetic central character, with good support from Henshall as the somewhat eccentric Marcus and Duff and Hamilton as the other members of the quartet, while Cantona as the pretentious auteur is both convincing and funny. In the opening sequence Jed watches Thierry being interviewed on film, holding forth about love being the only thing that is important in life and that we must do anything to find it. The camera angles and close ups in the interview reflect the arty techniques this director uses in his films, an extract from which we then see, being a story about a man who mistakes a dentist for a hooker. It's a lovely bit of pastiche. The ending of a relationship, intones Thierry, is in its beginning. Hmm, that should get us all looking back at how our own relationships started.
As the story progresses - Cheryl refuses Jed's long awaited proposal of marriage and they go into couple counselling; Marcus and Sophie's seemingly perfect relationship turns out to be very different from how it appears - the mood changes from comedy to bitter sweet melancholy and back again, shifts which are delicately and skilfully handled by the director. The core of the film is how the English handle romance as embodied in Jed's character, in a way that can most accurately be described as doing his incompetent best, set against his/our ambivalent attitude to the all or nothing French approach. Even Jed and Cheryl's couples counsellor turns out be French.
Oudney, making an impressive feature film debut after several years as a camera assistant, uses the varied London locations to give a good sense of life in the city as it was when the film was being shot in the nostalgic days before yesterday, when smoking was still allowed in pubs and Eurostar left from Waterloo. It's neatly and perceptively written by Aschline Ditta, who also wrote Scenes of a Sexual Nature and is obviously intrigued by the many and various aspects of love. I look forward to seeing more work from both of them.
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