Director Peter Chelsom clearly hopes that the stars of his romantic comedy Serendipity ? Britain?s Kate Beckinsale playing daffy and America?s John Cusack acting hangdog ? will make people overlook a screwball plot that is, let me try to be as positive about this as possible, breathtakingly stupid.
Two attractive young people fall head over heels in love with each other in the glove department at Manhattan?s fashionable department store Bloomingdale?s, but she ? quirky little dear that she is ? insists they trust in the benevolence of fate to bring them together again.
He writes his phone number on a five-dollar note which he gives to a stranger. She puts her name and number on the front page of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel and promises to offer it for sale in a second-hand book store, though she won?t say which. And they part.
Then, some years older though apparently no wiser, they are each on the verge of marrying someone else, but decide on the very brink of matrimony to search for their true soulmate. How does one start to describe people like this? Incurably cute, or insufferably cutesy? If you don?t find them irritating to begin with, you will by the end of this movie.
We are meant, of course, to be rooting for the leads, but I felt more for the soon-to-be-jilted man and woman, whose sin was merely to be lower down the cast list ? and therefore free to be tossed aside like, er, an old glove.
In the film?s desperate efforts to keep its lovers missing each other by seconds, it relies on so many implausible coincidences that it made me want to scream with rage at the characters and scriptwriter Marc Klein.
The one bright spot is Eugene Levy?s turn as an officious salesman in Bloomingdale?s, but it isn?t nearly enough. Peter Chelsom ? who was responsible for the delightful Hear My Song ? must win some kind of booby prize for having directed this and the even more horrendous Town And Country in consecutive years.
At this rate, it can?t be long before he agrees to direct The Princess Diaries 2: The Crisis, in which the leading lady chips her nail polish while attempting a makeover of the Sudetenland.
Serendipity
Cert: certPG
