William Russell targets the best of the latest and welcomes the surefire successor to Four Weddings and a Funeral.
BREAK out the champagne, let the welkin ring. It's a wonderful life. Here is the successor to Four Weddings and a Funeral; a sparkling, hilarious, well-nigh perfect romantic comedy about three guys and a gal, called Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence. It is the film Sliding Doors and Shooting Fish aspired to be, and if several stars are not born as a result then there is no justice in the world.
The script by Peter Morgan is clever, taut, and packed with repartee to savour, while the performances are utterly beguiling and the director, Nick Hamm keeps this admittedly fragile bubble floating in the air. The plot is simple and yet gloriously convoluted. Martha (Monica Potter in her first leading role), a pretty American fleeing from her past - a lousy lover and a bad job - takes a plane to Europe on a whim. At the airport she is spotted by Frank (Tom Hollander), a music mogul, who falls instantly in love and arranges, although they are booked on different flights, to sit next to her.
Learning she has nowhere to stay he offers her a room in one of his hotels on condition she lunch with him the following day. She does not turn up and when he sees the bill discovers she has ordered champagne for two at midnight. Heartbroken, sort of, Frank summons his boyhood friends, Daniel (Rufus Sewell), a failed actor - once a child film star - who gets love letters from six-year-old girls every time one of his films is shown on television, and Laurence (Joseph Fiennes), an uptight bridge tutor, who has been piggy in the middle of the threesome ever since they first became school friends. His role is to pick up the pieces, provide the shoulder for the other two to cry on, and in return they call him Florence.
We learn all this because Laurence has stumbled out of his apartment early in the morning, rung the doorbell of a neighbour, a psychiatrist (Ray Winstone), and sought his advice. We learn that in London Martha has met Daniel in the park, and Daniel reckons he has at last managed to get one of Frank's women. But why is Laurence
in such a tizzy? Because he, too, has met Martha.
But no more plot, because nothing should be given away. The pieces of the jigsaw fit together beautifully and the portrait of Conran's London and Blair's Cool Brittania - sorry, Tony, but you are stuck with it - is devastatingly funny.
The boys are all in their different ways sex on legs, short ones in the case of Hollander, a born bantam cock. Sewell as the self-obsessed thespian, a nineties Withnail, gives his best screen performance to date and is deliriously funny, while Fiennes as the tongue-tied, inhibited Laurence demonstrates that even an anorak can have sex appeal. Froth it may be, but Morgan also has something perceptive to say about blokeishness and what makes men friends for life, even when they fall for the same woman.
Monica Potter, although one has no reason to remember, was last seen as Nicolas Cage's wife in Con Air. Maybe we could have been told more about Martha, but in a sense she is a Holly Golightly figure. Holly in the story is a prostitute. In the film she was Audrey Hepburn and that was all that mattered. Potter is no Hepburn, but she is what the role requires: sexy, flakey, and irresistible - a bit like the entire film.
The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski is a glorious ''take'' on the world of Raymond Chandler, set in and around a bowling alley in Venice, California, where Dude Lebowski (Jeff Bridges in great form, but terrible shape) plays bowls with his friends, Walter (John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi), smokes a bit of dope, drinks a lot, and lays about a lot more.
A couple of thugs break into his apartment and beat him up, having mistaken him for the real Lebowski, a Pasadena millionaire. Dude seeks recompense and ends up hired by the other Lebowski to find who is doing the menacing. All the ingredients are there: old husband, errant wife, sexy daughter who seduces Dude, and assorted thugs, stirred together with the Coens' inimitable skill.
Goodman is marvellous, as is Buscemi as Donny, while John Turturro contributes a dazzling cameo as an Hispanic gay. But it is Bridges, languid, half-stoned, and wearing terrible clothes, who holds it together.
A Japanese Strictly Ballroom, Masayuki Suo's Shall We Dance is an utterly beguiling tale of romance in the world of sequin flounces and white ties. Office worker Shohei Sugiyama falls in love with a mysterious woman he sees from his train home to the suburbs each night gazing sadly out of the window of a dance studio. He goes for lessons, gets hooked on dancing, while his wife, feeling neglected, sets a detective on him. But the detective also succumbs to the dance. The beautiful instructor has no time for romance. She is dreaming about how she failed to win the ballroom dancing championship at Blackpool, mecca for dancers the world round. It is a charming, funny, and ever so slightly bitter-sweet film. The dance routines are terrific, as are the tunes.
The locals are yokels and the elements are in a ferment in Amy Foster, a romantic drama in the style of The Piano, set in nineteenth century Cornwall where shipwrecked Russian sailor Yanko (Vincent Perez) falls in love with farmgirl Amy (Rachel Weisz), whose father may be her brother her mother her sister, or a bit of both, but who has a lousy life. The local doctor (Ian McKellen) is in two minds which he loves best, and the peasantry treat Amy and Yanko like dirt, not that it matters.
Lew Grade's long awaited Something To Remember is not only unforgettable, it is unmissable. The plot is the one about the beautiful girl (Maria Pitillo) with two weeks to live who leaves her job as a croupier in Las Vegas to visit Trevino, a village in the heart of Umbria, south of Assisi, where a weeping Madonna, according to Time magazine, has been working miracles.
On the way she hitches a lift from a handsome American pianist (William McNamara). You can guess the rest. McNamara bashes the ivories spectacularly, Pitillo has loads of charm, and Ian Bannen and Tom Conti do a knock 'em dead in the isles double act as the Trevino parish priest and the man from the Vatican. Like the Madonna, you too will weep.
new releases
Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence (15)
88 mins
Directed by Nick Hamm
The Big Lebowski (18)
116 mins
Directed by Joel Coen
Amy Foster (12)
113 mins
Directed by Beeban Kidron
Something To Believe In (PG)
130 mins
Directed by John Hough
On general release
Shall We Dance (PG)
117 mins
Directed by Masayuki Suo
GFT and Filmhouse
All films open tomorrow
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