Deborah Ross

About Time review: If Richard Curtis is brilliant at anything, it’s Upper Middle Class Lifestyle Porn

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issue 07 September 2013

The easiest thing would be to sneer at Richard Curtis’s new film About Time, and so I will a little, or maybe significantly. It’s hard to know at this point, as I’m up here, at the beginning, and the end is down there, at the bottom, and who knows what will happen in between. It’s as much a mystery to me as to you. However, pre-sneering, in whatever amount, I should make clear that if you have enjoyed Curtis’s previous films— Four Weddings, Love, Actually, Notting Hill, but not The Boat That Rocked, which we’ll pretend never happened, as that’s best all round — you will enjoy this. It’s more of the same, pretty much, as our bumbling hero searches for love, bumblingly. It’s sweet (she says, sneeringly) but, try as I might, and I did try, I just could not find it interesting or affecting, in any way.

The film opens in a gorgeous, huge, rambling pink house by the sea in Cornwall.

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