The Very Thought of You

(Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence, Nick Hamm, UK, 1998)

Leafing one day through a listing of forthcoming releases from a major commercial distributor, it seemed like every second film was billed "a wacky, sweet, light-hearted comedy about twentysomethings searching for love, lust and meaningful relationships in a crazy, modern world".

Romantic comedy of this sort is the preferred standby of many filmmakers currently working in the sticky crossover zone between commercial and arthouse cinema. Dim memories of the old screwball classics are crossed with a few superficial storytelling games gleaned from Kieslowski or Tarantino.

The Very Thought of You – originally titled Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence – is a British movie in the mould of Sliding Doors (1998) or If Only (1998).

Once again, scruffy chaps with bulging eyes and easily bruised egos glide through London's trendiest bars, theatres and galleries, desperately trying to fathom the mysteries of romantic attraction.

Frank (Rufus Sewell), Daniel (Tom Hollander) and Laurence (Joseph Fiennes) have a particularly knotty problem to untangle. In one of those magical, nutty coincidences typical of contemporary romantic comedy, all three fall, within the same day for a zany American visitor, Martha (Monica Potter).

Martha is one of the chief handicaps of this inoffensive but unmemorable film. Potter plays her in sub-Julia Roberts mode: girlish, frazzled, self-pitying, her face always just on the cusp between a giggly smile and a morose pout. In short, she is a right, royal pain, and what all these guys see in her is the greatest mystery of all.

Director Nick Hamm and writer Peter Morgan dress up all the cornball gags and elementary appeals to sentiment with a tricksy narrative structure: as in Pulp Fiction (1994), the separate tales that each character tells form an interlocking, dovetailing pattern. Unfortunately, this laboured arrangement carries no frisson at all.

The film contains some charming vignettes and jokes – most of them centred affectionately on the queeny bickering between Frank and Daniel. This is a pleasing reversal of the usual gender stereotypes, but little else in the script matches it for cleverness or inventiveness.

MORE Hamm: Godsend

© Adrian Martin May 1999