Friday, February 10, 1995

ARTS-UNLUCKY in love
HUGO DAVENPORT

SOLITAIRE FOR 2
(15 cert, 107 mins)
general release

Gary Sinyor jointly wrote, produced and directed the offbeat British comedy, Leon the Pig Farmer, with Vadim Jean. Their subsequent solo careers make you wonder how they worked together. Chalk and cheese isn’t in it, for Jean has since directed the manic, exploitative Beyond Bedlam, while Sinyor continued wearing the same three hats to make Solitaire for 2, another oddball comedy.

The film has an ingenious, Cartesian premise-a manipulative male, who teaches body language to corporate executives, falls in love with a woman palaeontologist able to read his mind through ESP. Unfortunately, it is also flawed in its execution-partly because it does not follow its own skewed logic right down the line, and partly because it is much too slow.

Sinyor casts Mark Frankel, the lead actor from Leon the Pig Farmer, as Daniel Becker, the behaviourist with a commitment problem, who is first seen dumping a girlfriend by staring moodily out of the window to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem.

He is soon pursuing a new woman, Katie Burrill (Amanda Pays), inexplicably attracted by her tendency to sock him in the jaw.

She is free with her fist, it transpires, because her telepathic talents allow her to divine immediately that, like most men, he has “a mind like a sewer”. Despite disastrous dates and a hovering rival (Roshan Seth), Daniel persists, wooing her with flowers, champagne, Italian meals, and-worst of all-a personal performance by Right Said Fred in South Kensington’s Natural History Museum to celebrate a marriage proposal she hasn’t yet accepted.

The problem here is not so much that neither character is especially likeable: they simply have nothing in common. Katie places intellect above feelings-true, it’s a refreshing change to see a heroine so aggressively resistant to the corny strategies of conventional romance-whereas Daniel, aside from his cunning, hasn’t an original idea in his head. He’s a yuppie moron, really.

What’s more, Katie’s telepathy is both omniscient and selective. She does not perceive, for instance, that a note on his fridge door is just another game to get the upper hand.

Other characters behave implausibly, like the friend (Jason Isaacs) who throws Daniel out when Katie informs them of Daniel’s dream about the friend’s wife (Maryam D’Abo).

Too knowing for romance, too long to sustain its own slightness, the film becomes a mangled mosaic of patchy comic moments.