David Kane's comedy Born Romantic, from BBC Films, is so bulging and groaning with award-winning British actors that some of them appear fleetingly, almost subliminally.
Sally Phillips has a tiny cameo as the mobileaholic girlfriend whose phone Craig Ferguson throws out of a cab window. Jessica Stevenson has about one exasperated line as someone who puts up David Morrissey in her flat while he looks for his lost love (Jane Horrocks).
Ian Hart is a garrulous and faintly malign minicab driver who sits Buddha-like in a caff, diverting fellow drivers John Thomson and Adrian Lester with his iffy tinted specs and dodgy excursions into philosophy and sexual politics. And Jimi Mistry is an incompetent "street mugger" who looks after his confused old dad (Kenneth Cranham) and falls in love with Catherine McCormack, a timid, mousy person whose job is to attend graves on behalf of family members who have moved away.
David Kane established a reputation with his amiable Britpic This Year's Love last year and this is similar material. It is centred on the Corazon, a London nightclub where the salsa is taught, and the convenient venue for all the characters to fall in and out of love, their inner turmoil disclosed by the questioning of Jimmy (Lester) the concerned cabbie who ferries them about.
Everyone in the cast gives a strong performance, especially Morrissey, an actor who grows in stature with each outing. Craig Ferguson is funny as Frankie, the absurd proprietor of an easy-listening club who fancies himself as a latter day Rat Pack swinger, unblushingly using expressions like "broad" and "ring-a-ding-ding".
But despite all the classy talent in the cast, there is something a bit flat about this movie, like a bottle of Coke that has lost its fizz. Kane's characterisation, with its variations of wackiness and pathos, never looks much like real life and Born Romantic often seems more a TV idea than a film. In fact, the whole scenario might grow better as a six-part comedy drama in the Cold Feet mould. Jack Rosenthal's The Chain finally evolved into a TV series; a Sunday night BBC drama slot might yet be the destiny of Born Romantic.
