Review of 'French Film'

Watched on iPlayer via Chromecast, and watched for the second time. Not entirely through choice, because it isn't really worth watching twice, but Ruth couldn't remember seeing it so...

Nominally a rom-com, and about relationships with some funny bits, there's nevertheless a lot of sadness and misery in this film. Hugh Bonneville establishes himself as the "poor man/woman's Colin Firth" by playing an ineffectual, uncomfortable posh bloke who is a journalist in an unsatisfactory relationship with his girlfriend Cheryl (Victoria Hamilton).

There's a good deal of un-reflective stereotyping of French people and French-ness - the couples counsellor that they go to is a self-important over-intellectual French guy, for example. Eric Cantona plays a gnomic French film director. Although HB is the sympathetic focus of the story, and a self-proclaimed anti-French xenophobe, the French people in the film all turn out to have been right all along - the couple should split up, how relationships begin determines how they'll end, love is something that you just know when it happens...