This Year's Love (1999)
The big-screen debut from Scottish stage director David Kane, This Year's Love is a comedy about the romantic misadventures of six young people in Camden, North London. The marriage of tattoo artist Danny (Douglas Hanshall) and dressmaker Hannah (Catherine McCormack) gets off to a less-than-inspiring start when Danny finds out Hannah has already been fooling around with a friend's husband, so Danny takes a walk and Hannah splits with a friend to get drunk. At the airport, where the newly-weds were supposed to leave for a honeymoon, Danny meets a cleaning woman named Mary (Kathy Burke) and is immediately infatuated, while Hannah is picked up by a scruffy artist named Cameron (Dougray Scott). Elsewhere, Liam (Ian Hart), a geeky comic-art enthusiast who shares an apartment with Cameron, finds romance with Sophie (Jennifer Ehle), a single mother and full-time neurotic.
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Slow pace in the most part of the movie.
Expected more
If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
Worth seeing for the various scenes of Camden in the late Nineties. Apart from that I found almost impossible to relate to anything that was happening on the screen. Affairs are started, continued and/or abandoned on a whim. The characters have all the depth of a very shallow puddle and generally are extremely difficult to care for. In a sense, it's understandable they do sleep around: their partners' personalities are so uniform, what makes it possible to discriminate between one or the other?A marginally interesting side is that, watching it today, it has a time capsule aspects. No cell phones, no social media: everything is dealt with in person. I missed that kind of youth by just a handful of years, having come of age slightly later. I envy them a little.
....I have seen! Great cast and soundtrack but the both the story line and script are awful.Whilst understanding that people may want a more 'gritty' romantic comedy than say Four Weddings or Love Actually this film fails to deliver.In fact I do not think it was a comedy at all! Also I felt no feeling or love towards any of the characters.All of them did not have my sympathy or understanding as quite frankly they are a dismal self obsessed bunch (Sophie being the worst offender!) This is meant to be more 'real' than the other British films I have mentioned. But thank God I have not ever come across people like this during my relationships in real life!!! There are much better 'realistic' British films out there and great romantic comedies like Four Weddings, Notting Hill etc etc
found this film by mistake and wasn't expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised, a real gem of a movie. Cathy Burke singing was a surprise and she wasn't that bad, The characters were realistic and I know the area well so can attest to this, happy endings were not mandatory in this film which makes it more poignant. Could imagine another film with these characters being made five years down the line and still holding our interest. Dougray Scott was surprisingly attractive even with greasy hair, he showed a good understanding of the character. All in all the actors in this film showed why British film-making is up there with the best.
For me, this film was lifted by the performances of Ian Harte and Kathy Burke. Both of these actors have had interesting careers in which they've not always made the right choices and here the film would be a much slighter thing without them. Ian Harte is absolutely outstanding - you see him disintegrate before your eyes while Kathy Burke's self-hatred must resonate with many women. It makes a change to see a London that a lot of Brits would recognise with geography that makes sense (apart from the taxi to Heathrow from Camden perhaps?). For all I enjoyed films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, it's nice to see the country I actually live in represented more realistically on screen.