Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Shannon Tarbet, Shelley Conn, Rupert Penry-Jones, Celia Imrie, Bill Paterson
Intro:
...takes the thinnest of subjects and tells a little tale that some will find sweet and will leave others scratching their heads.
You can make films about anything, a slice of life, even a slice of cake. This British film takes the thinnest of subjects and tells a little tale that some will find sweet and will leave others scratching their heads.
At the beginning of the film, Sarah (Candice Brown who appropriately enough appears on The Great British Bake Off) dies (off screen) in a bike accident. Her daughter Clarissa (Shannon Tarbet) then decides to open a café in her mother’s honour and call it ‘Love Sarah’.
Clarissa enlists the help of her mum’s long-time friend Isabella (Shelley Conn) and, then, her estranged grandmother Mimi (the hard-working Celia Imrie). Thereafter, one of Isabella’s old flames, Matthew (TV actor Rupert Penry-Jones), comes on the scene. Of course, he is a great cook too and the pair of them have a sparring relationship in the small café kitchen. They start off getting on each other’s nerves, which sure enough leads to the universal cliché that they will fall in love and live happily ever after. You get the idea.
Just to give it a bit of symmetry, or some appeal to the older female audiences that might go to this sort of film, Bill Paterson is wheeled in as the eligible charming older man for the dotty-but-still-frisky Imrie (her stock in trade too). Paterson has been in nearly 150 films and he could play this part with his eyes shut. In fact, that might have been a good idea. He certainly didn’t need to look at the script. The café is apparently in Notting Hill Gate – an inner city London post code which has become a kind of fantasy setting for British rom coms – but not much is made of this angle either.
The idea of two young women running a charmingly eccentric little café has echoes of the far stronger TV series Fleabag of course (where Paterson was used to much better effect) but here there is nothing bittersweet enough to darken the pastel-coloured confection.
Relatively new director Eliza Schroeder is finding her way here, but the project needed much more shape and a far stronger premise and script. The whole thing is a soufflé (a sweet one of course). It may have looked golden and inviting in its early stages. Just don’t open the oven door.
