THEN SHE FOUND ME. Dir Helen Hunt. 2008

Generally implausible. Unlikely marriage followed by unlikely affair. April (Helen Hunt) marries Ben (Matthew Broderick), a Jewish boy with arrested development. She is almost 40 and desperate for a baby, and their odd relationship indicates lust for each other although they are unable to communicate, despite supposedly being best friends.

Ben leaves her and goes back to mother. That same day she meets Frank (Colin Firth) and within a few days is in love with him but she still wants to have sex with her estranged husband. Already neurotic and fragile, her adoptive mother dies, leaving April with a lot of emotional baggage to deal with. But this is not all. Her birth mother, Bernice (Bette Midler), has tracked her down and wants a reunion.

This set up is perfect for a farce and there are light moments. April initially doesn’t believe Bernice is her mother and gets pretty stressed about the near-stalking. Understandably attracted to Frank as the only stable character in this scenario, April says she is in love with him with in a few days of meeting him. Now, this can happen, but not with these two. This story would have been so much more powerful if their relationship had been based on simple, trusting friendship.

Hunt's directing debut is fine but miscasting disappoints. Sadly, despite being obliged to fake sex for the benefit of the sated voyeur, there is no on screen chemistry between them. Both actors are individually impressive but they don’t gel. Firth is always good but there is a feeling of weariness here, as though he knows these two characters would never get together and he’s slightly embarrassed about the charade.

Direction focuses mostly on the realistic – scenes in school, in the road, with Frank and his sleeping children, all well done and plausible. However, expecting an audience to believe that Bette Midler could be Helen Hunt’s mother is bizarre. Even though Bernice was supposed to be 15 when she gave birth to April this is stretching credulity beyond its limits.

As far as the story goes, Elinor Lipman’s tale of abandoned child and reunited birth mother is reasonable. April is suspicious of her mother’s motives, and angry at being given up for adoption. Oblique dialogue employed to create tension is overused so straight answers to straight questions would be welcomed.

The penultimate scene in which April reappears in front of Frank’s house, ostensibly to apologise for treating him so badly, would have been better omitted. Frank has been thoroughly decent throughout, scarred and sensitive, always kind to her – and yet she stands before him, not apologizing, but delivering a lecture on how she will hurt him again and again. Instead of legging it, he says lamely, ‘Oh shit,’ or something equally banal to demonstrate that they are so hopelessly in love with each other that they’re stuck with this unhealthy situation.

Hunt is likeable as April, and Frank is kind, but the eccentric Bernice is too brash for their sensitivities. Offered as light relief from the ‘desperate-for-a-baby’ neurosis, it grates. April is raw and needy, Frank is tired and muddled, and doing his best to cope with two small children. The last thing he needs is an angry, hormonally disturbed older woman. Everything is unlikely.

I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG. Dir Philippe Claudel. 2008

Kristen Scott Thomas plays Juliette, a woman just released from prison after serving 15 years. Reunited with her much younger sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), Juliette tries to find where she fits in with her family and the outside world.

When first seen, Juliette looks depressed, is silent and withdrawn, and almost hostile to her younger sister’s attempts to integrate her into her own warm family set up. It is not clear for a while where she has been, why the sisters are estranged, and why Juliette seems so resentful. Léa’s husband, Luc, is suspicious and family tensions are nicely observed.

With little dialogue and a strongly visual emphasis, the narrative flowed a bit slowly at times and the reason for her imprisonment could have come a bit earlier. Only one scene in the entire film was clumsy exposition, with the awkward attempt by a social worker to draw out Juliette. Deeply wounded and fragile, she is too intelligent to be befriended by a busybody, however well meaning, and her experience too devastating for a girlie chat.

Her probation officer talks openly to her about his own disaffection, as if he seeks the intimacy that she shuns. This man with the open manner, beautiful eyes and expression fails to move her but she learns that the unhappiness that he chatters about so easily masks a deeper pain than her own. When she finally tells her story, in a powerful scene with Léa, their mutual pain is searing, and makes a striking and dramatic contrast with this otherwise quietly paced film.

Acting is very fine by the whole cast. Scott Thomas is deep, strong but damaged and Zylberstein has endless charm and exquisite sensitivity. This is a very sad, intimate story handled with great sensitivity.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE. Dir Marc Forster. 2008

Casino Royale left Bond wanting revenge. QofS follows up with a frenzied opening car chase sequence, with Bond in the Aston screaming through tunnels, round bends, getting shot at and, eventually delivering his cargo. The unusual thing about this car chase is the camerawork. Rarely seeing whole vehicles, jigsaw close-ups of tiny bits of cars are slammed at the audience. This dizzying, anxiety inducing onslaught feels like being repeatedly hit in the face and deafened at the same time.

Several times the cinematography mixes two dramatic events together, ie a horserace above ground with an interrogation below. The result is confusion and disorientation and is reminiscent of the noise and colour of carnival intercuts from early Bond movies. QofS incorporates motifs from other Bond classics – a flight battle in mountainous terrain and a speedboat pursuit.

However, QofS omits the humour, the characterisation, the sexiness, the glamour, and a storyline. There is little sense of who these people are. Taking out the sex and graphic violence (as in Casino Royale) drops the rating down to a 12A which makes it clear that the audience for QofS are adolescent boys. Lots of explosions and noise, stunts and breakages, and no girly stuff like conversation. QofS lacks the humanity of Casino Royal, perhaps simply because no-one eats, sleeps or has sex. Bond does, apparently, have sex with an agent within an hour of meeting her but there is no sense of flirtation or mutual attraction, no seduction, and she supposedly succumbs to his line, ‘I can’t seem to find the stationery. Will you help me look?’ How could any girl resist?

In the few opportunities Daniel Craig is given to act, he is superb. The frenetic pace slows in a few places, enough for one scene following an air crash in which he and the Bolivian female agent show they both have scores to settle, another when he demonstrates enormous compassion when she is terrified, (lifted from the shower scene in Casino Royale), and the third when he is tender with Mathis. It’s a pity to waste a talented actor like this. Craig is more than just a fit, effective body and QofS portrays him as a machine who is immune to injury despite falling from heights many times, surviving car crashes, explosions and burning buildings. Judi Dench’s M has been rewritten as motherly, indulgent, and somewhat fragile rather than authoritative and waspish.

Hugely reliant on exciting stunt work, fight sequences are so close-shot and intercut it is impossible to see who is hitting who, who’s falling, who’s been shot, and why. There is some brief politico-economic discussion about land ownership which means that the bad guy gets to charge what he likes for water but these scenes lack tension. The script doesn’t provide verbal or psychological sparring, the threats are only physical. Oh, and the double agents are all British.