Love lies bleeding

A writer, John Dearborn, known as Bron, persuades a publisher to commission him to do a book about love at first sight. Bron is obsessed with Paul Marotte, a physician living in Amsterdam who one day in 1889 sees Kate Summer on a bridge and instantly falls in love, decides to paint professionally and they join Gauguin and others at Pont-Aven. And then one misty morning by a river down in deepest Devon Bron, too, sees a girl on a bridge and he knows exactly what Marotte felt.

Flora is no unworldly Kate. Everyone’s enjoyed her, including Mick Jagger and David Bailey, and she has husband problems. Now she’s through with love. Yet when Bron suddenly quotes Lauren Bacall’s famous lines from To Have and to Have Not, ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?’, she immediately quotes the lines that follow. A beauty who reveres that great movie is no more ‘through with love’ than Woody Allen was when he sang those same words in Everyone Says I Love You.