Notting Hill

It’s not a sequel, honest. It just happens to have all the same elements of the winning Four Weddings and a Funeral formula. There’s Hugh Grant doing his floppy-haired ineffectual Englishman routine again, a big-name American love interest (Julia Roberts) to tickle the US box office, a token homosexual (don’t worry, queer folk – this time he survives to the closing credits), a token Disabled Person Who Isn’t Defined By Their Disability, and a bunch of old pals on hand to dispense comic advice on the developing romance. But fuckety-fuck! They seem to have forgotten to include someone for those of us who aren’t wealthy metropolitan types to identify with. Oh no, my mistake – here come Rhys Ifans as an agreeably oikish masturbating Welshman.

Here’s the plot. Conveniently divorced Hugh lives in Notting Hill, which he loves in the same way as Woody Allen loves Manhattan (this means it doesn’t have any black people in it). Although he owns a bloody great town house, his travel bookshop business on the verge of collapse. But his slobbish lodger (Ifans) supplies ribald regional working class humour, so that’s OK. Then Julia walks into Hugh’s bookshop and he spills some orange juice all over her like the endearing klutz he is, which prompts her to snog him. As you do. But Julia’s a big American film star and Hugh’s just a stuttering toff with a failing business, some posh chums, and an unshaven Welsh wanker in his spare room. The course of true love may not be expected to run smooth. Or not until the big hanky-moistening moment at the end, anyway.

Despite Grant’s increasing irksomeness and the breathtaking implausibility of the plot, even the most curmudgeonly romcom hater would be hard pushed to deny that Notting Hill delivers on the crowd-pleasing humour front, mostly thanks to the presence of Ifans. Despite the suspicion that this is the most extravagant estate agent’s advert in history (the exterior shots of Hugh’s home actually show scriptwriter Richard Curtis’s house, which was then on the market), Notting Hill keeps the gags and one-liners flowing throughout. There’s also a priceless scene where Hugh poses as a hack from Horse and Hound to get close to Julia only to find that her latest film is set in space, severely limiting his enquiries about its equine and canine qualities. Where it all falls a bit flat is in the endless celebrity special pleading which attempts to engage our sympathies for poor, hard-done-by $15-million-a-picture film stars. In one extraordinarily ill-judged scene, Curtis’s script has Roberts attempting to equate the misery of constant dieting with that of one of Grant’s chums, who’s been confined to a wheelchair since an accident and has just found out that she can’t have children.