Thursday, February 9, 1995

Features

Sympathy for the Devilish Cinema
Geoff Brown

After the space opera of Star Trek, Solitaire for 2 brings us crashing down to earth: London traffic wardens, bookshops, restaurants. The National History Museum. A Hampstead front garden. This is the background to the new film by Gary Sinyor, one of the team responsible for Leon the Pig Farmer. His colleague Vadim Jean has since veered off into explicit horror with Beyond Bedlam. Sinyor, however, has stayed with humour, and fashioned an eccentric romantic comedy that works only in fits and starts.

The problem starts with the awkward basic idea. Daniel, the hero, is a lecturer in body language, used to applying his skills at manipulation and behavioural science to bed woman. Heroine Katie is an archaeologist, unlucky in love and blessed, or cursed with extra-sensory perception: give her a Tube carriage or a passing waiter and she can read every thought.

As in Hollywood’s vintage screwball comedies, the pair’s fractious first meeting eventually blossoms into love, although Sinyor’s script lacks the sparkling dialogue that would kick the genre back to life.

His cast comes up short. Amanda Pays, brittle, defensive, forever completing others’ sentences is acceptable enough as the woman most at ease discussing old bones. But Mark Frankel, the hero of Leon the Pig Farmer, dispenses his charm so heavy-handedly that his presence becomes wearing.

Sinyor deserves credit for mounting his film smoothly and reviving an attractive genre; but this is clearly a project that needed more time on the drawing board.