NOTTING HILL (37)

Directed by: Roger Michell

Starring: Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Rhys Ifans, Tim McInnerny

The Pitch: Big Hollywood star falls for 'ordinary' Londoner. Gosh.

Theo Sez: Alternative title: "We're Not Worthy!". A celebration (and prime example) of British cultural cringe towards America, travel-brochuring a lively, ethnically-mixed London district for the transatlantic-tourist market and promoting a tabloid view of Hollywood glamour as the province of gods and goddesses, to be fawned over by us mere mortals. The scene where Grant is forced into pretending he's a journalist in order to get a five-minute audience with La Roberts - and makes a total ass of himself as he desperately improvises one inane question after another - is funny but also rather ugly, because the object of his desire (who's done hundreds of interviews, and could easily get him off the hook) doesn't help at all, merely watches him squirm with a half-smile on her face - as though humiliation were a necessary part of what he has to go through before she'll deign to love him. The film is a weirdly unbalanced love story, devoid of the usual structure whereby two people travel in opposite directions meeting somewhere in the middle, more analogous to a person knocking on a door, waiting to be let in - that Hugh could ever refuse the divine Julia is so preposterous that when he does it's treated as a major joke. The whole thing reeks of self-pity and pathetic over-niceness, exemplified in Grant's enervated fluttering and his friends' take-it-on-the-chin perkiness, joking blithely about their disabilities or holding dinner-table contests to see whose life is the saddest. Michell doesn't embarrass himself, except in a gratuitously sappy insert of an inscription on a park bench, but this is really rather a hateful film, and the rating seems in retrospect unjustifiably high ; on the other hand it did make me laugh, it's well-spoken (maybe even witty) and it encapsulates a certain kind of middle-class existence - one where money's less important than Sensitivity, good manners are a given, one's acquaintances may include not just vegetarians but "fruitarians", politics are implicitly left-wing, and heaven is sitting in the park reading "Captain Corelli's Mandolin". Plus of course it contains a reference - maybe even a deliberate one - to the immortal Monty Python 'bookshop sketch'...