Art can break your heart; or, I'm a softie

Rating: 9/10 (21 March 2004)

What can I say? Despite the fact that my brother, an outgoing fitness-instructor drooling at Mel Gibson films, thinks I belong, seemingly voluntarily, to the group of slightly socially inhibited self-proclaimed intellectuals requiring a cerebrally sound reason for loving a film (or anything else for that matter), and cannot appreciate anything not directed by an Uzbekistani with one leg off, I actually like this film to bits.
Technically this film isn't 'great' when it comes to images, so it falls short there. But, despite me always telling that films should be about images and only books should involve stories, I have no problem completely ignoring any of my own gibberish and cry out that this is, and you bl***y well believe it, one of the greatest films ever made.
Never have the seemingly superficial emotions that well up from the Deep Good been so efficiently shoved down our throats. I saw it only fairly recently for the first time and was immediately hooked, by the lines, the story, the flow, and the absolutely nuclear power that flows from the faces of the Grant and Roberts. I wasn't really pro-Roberts and still think she invariably stars in the wrong pictures, but here she's nothing less than grand. I won't comment on Hugh Grant since, probably to balance out my love for Werner Herzog films, my brain has decided to like him to bits as an actor. My girlfriend keeps suggesting I might have a queer spark there, but she shouldn't complain, since I've been with her for 11 years.
The fact that they can shine though, is, apart from their dialogue, entirely due to the exquisite cast surrounding them. I like Tim McInnerny a lot, but Gina McKee is a real treat here. Not only does she beam the love that Grant lacks, but she's a stunningly gorgeous woman as well.
Romance, love, sunny London, it all smells of the profoundly bizarre or utterly impossible, but it all works. This is the film that Joyce would have ended Ulysses with: Yes!