108 minutes, 18
By taking one of last week's cinema releases, Your Friends and Neighbours, and grouping it with such stage plays as
Closer and The Blue Room, you could prove the existence of a fashion for melancholy dramas that portray the dating game
as a theatre of war, dominated by predatory instincts. This Year's Love has something in common with these works. Like
them, it takes a small sample of human specimens and sends them through rounds of coupling until all possible heterosexual
permutations are exhausted. And, as in those other analyses, the results of the experiment do little to encourage faith in the
power of love. However, David Kane's film departs from the vogue for absolute cynicism by allowing its characters some
capacity for kindness and idealism - their repeatedly broken hearts are usually the result of bad luck and forgivable
weakness, rather than true cruelty. This concession - which is of a piece with the script's commitment to light comedy - is so
refreshing that you are tempted to look favourably on the film, and even to feel some sympathy for its characters, the usual
bunch of Camden-dwelling twentysomethings. (The cast includes Ian Hart, Kathy Burke, Jennifer Ehle, Catherine
McCormack and Emily Woof.) All in all, though, the movie does not have quite as much flair as it needs. Contrary to the
uninspired claims of publicists, this is not a new Four Weddings.
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