Reviews

If this was rubbish, we would be calling it a vanity project. But, luckily, Julie Delpy is not only a good actor, but a fine writer and director. There are elements of 'Amelie' and the classic Woody Allen comedies such as 'Annie Hall' and 'Manhattan', particularly in Adam Goldberg's neurotic response to the chic scruffiness that is Paris. This film has things to say about the Franco-American culture clash, but says them in a gentle and affectionate way. Until you've been to Paris, it is difficult to realize just how much in love with all things American the (urban) French actually are... until they encounter it face to face, when they find it so baffling that the only recourses are sarcasm and irony, in addition to lapsing into French spoken so fast that even some French speakers find it incomprehensible. There is also lots to say about relationships and how they work, or don't. If you are in a relationship, you will cringe with recognition. If you aren't, you will wonder whether you really ever want another one.

If you've seen Altman's 'Nashville', you've kind of seen this. It's just the era and backdrop that are different. Substitute Daniella Nardini for Geraldine Chaplin, Mangan or O'Dowd for Keith Carradine and you have the general idea. Griffin's best-known piece, 'The Book Group', also had multiple plot lines, but had time to develop over two three-hour series. In 'Festival', for instance, the plot line with the crazy Canadians had a fantasy quality to it, but didn't seem to be going anywhere. On the other hand, watching Petra staring at a drink, trying not to fall off the wagon, was heart-wrenching, as was the chat-up scene where she realizes as she talks about her job, that she has no real life apart from Sean, and hateful as he is he is all that stands between her and a return to drinking. That was brilliantly done, as was the young actress falling for Sean because she sees him as nobody else does, because she doesn't know his work or how famous he is. I wanted to like this film a lot more than I eventually did. It is worth seeing, but like so many British movies, it doesn't warrant the big screen treatment when a TV series would have been better.

OK, so Woody Allen's worst is better than most people's best, but this is drivel. Perhaps he thinks posh Brits speak like Noel Coward characters, but apart from Matthew Goode as Tom and Emily Mortimer as Chloe, none of the main characters sounded like real people. Thank goodness for Ewen Bremner and James Nesbit's appearances in the final section - they managed to bring something vaguely normal to proceedings. I would have thought Woody Allen knows enough about London to know how not to make a film look like low-rent Richard Curtis, but perhaps 'Notting Hill' and 'Love Actually' are his source material. Would it have been too much trouble to employ someone to work as a language consultant to make the dialogue sound like something other than a bad translation of Ibsen? Was the ridiculous first encounter between Scarlet Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers meant to sound like an an out-take from a 40s film noir? Perhaps, to use that favourite Hollywood catch-all excuse, Allen is being ironic. No, to use a truly British phrase, he is just being a bit rubbish.