Notting Hill

Reviewed by Peter Calder

Notting Hill *

Cast: Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant

Director: Roger Michell

Rating: M

First, a disclaimer: I didn't much care for Four Weddings And A Funeral, a cute and self-satisfied film whose minor characters - Kristin Scott Thomas and Simon Callow stand out - were its most interesting. But it was a masterpiece compared to this laboured romantic comedy which is billed as a follow-up, as distinct from a sequel.

Written by Weddings' Richard Curtis, the creator of Blackadder, it's a companion piece in theme, again featuring Grant as a tongue-tied twerpish Englishman who catches the eye of a ravishing American woman.

Quite why this happens is anyone's guess - as William Thacker, the divorced and heartsore owner of an unsuccessful travel bookshop in the Portobello Rd, Grant is so wet you feel like chucking him a lifejacket. But he proves irresistible to Anna Scott (Roberts), a Hollywood star in London to promote her new film. She shows up in his bookshop and later he literally bumps into her again, showering her with orange juice and inviting her back to his nearby house to change.

It's an improbable start to an even more improbable odd-couple romance, an uneasy blend of knockabout farce and love story which never works, not just because there is not a microgram of chemistry between the stars (there isn't) or because the storyline's so flabby (it is) but because Grant is so grievously miscast.

The film's tagline asks whether a megastar can "fall for the man in the street," but it's hard to think of anyone less like the man in the street than Grant, the famously errant consort to Liz Hurley whose first film appearance (playing a gay man) prompted Madonna to ask him out on a date.

Roberts does her brave best with a role of gobsmacking banality. She's not as irritating as the vacant and capricious Andie MacDowell in Weddings, though her mile-wide lips occupy almost as much screen space as her predecessor's hair. But in the end she earns points for courage because she's saddled with leaden lines (the worst, which is actually used twice, asks us to remember that she's "just a girl, standing in front of a boy and asking him to love her").

Meanwhile, supporting roles - Rhys Ifans as Thacker's slobbish flatmate and Emma Chambers as his starstruck sister - are overwritten and overplayed distractions.

The London borough of the title is ill-used too, as has been widely remarked - ethnically cleansed for the occasion. It looks like Parnell Rd only not as scruffy, and its few non-white faces are an acceptably unobtrusive latte colour, which wouldn't be so offensive if the writer hadn't billed the setting as "an extraordinary mix of cultures."

Director Roger Michell told the Observer that Notting Hill and Portobello are changing rapidly since the film was made. "Shops that were downmarket hardware stores have turned into Seattle Coffee shops," he said with no apparent sense of regret. "I think we caught the last of it. And no doubt our film will go some way towards ruining what it values most."

It's hard to imagine how better to express the smug cynicism of this entire project.

PS: The best bit is when it ends: over the credits comes the aching voice of the great Elvis Costello, reworking a Charles Aznavour standard into an instant 90s classic. She it's called and it's a knockout, dripping with the sincerity and passion that is so conspicuously absent from the movie.