Author and film-maker Rebecca Miller isn’t known for humour exactly, but she brings a sprightly sort of sweetness and preposterous innocence to this quirky-naive romantic comedy that she has written and directed, something with wit and fun but also ultimately an almost childlike seriousness - like a Woody Allen movie or a screwball but played at two-thirds of the speed and with fewer cynical wisecracks.
The excellent cast brings a prosecco sparkle. Peter Dinklage is Steven Lauddem, a celebrated opera composer, difficult, demanding and now creatively blocked, married to fashionable New York therapist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a gorgeous fashion plate with a love of neatness and an obsession with nuns. Steven is stepfather to her teen son Julian (Evan Ellison) who is dating Tereza (Harlow Jane), whose mum Magdalena (Joanna Kulig) is the Lauddems’ cleaner. Does that potentially awkward situation sound familiar? Could it be that Rebecca Miller, like the rest of us, spent her lockdown watching the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People on BBC iPlayer?
