Brief encounter

The couple in Matt Thorne's romantic comedy, Dreaming of Strangers, are film buffs. But is there enough drama in the cinema?

Dreaming of Strangers
Matt Thorne
Weidenfeld & Nicholson £9.99, pp243
Buy it at BOL

In Dreaming of Strangers, Matt Thorne makes his pitch: 'Characters in books didn't go [to the cinema], which struck Becca as strange, especially as nineteenth-century novelists had got so much mileage out of characters going to the theatre or the opera in times of turmoil.' Nor had anyone written a novel set in a call centre before Thorne's engaging Eight Minutes Idle, so a romantic comedy for film buffs is an attractive proposition.

Becca, mooching in her fuddy-duddy relationship, becomes intrigued by Chris, who rents her flat. She sneaks in to assess his video shelf, trails him through London into a cinema, engineers a casual meeting. She assures herself she is no stalker, but 'a kooky young heroine', and although initially alarmed to see Chris's collection fluttering with romantic comedies ('Where was the guy stuff?'), she dispels her doubts by constructing their encounters like a compendium of romantic screen moments. Working Girl, You've Got Mail, even Rocky, shape the plot. Happy the couple united by Melanie Griffith and Sylvester Stallone.

Perhaps filmgoing is too casual a practice to allow Thorne the bristling sense of occasion that a set piece demands: once people are slouched in the dark, glutting on popcorn and trailers, promising situations dribble away. Even a fancy-dress all-nighter of teen movies, its gauche absurdity flushed with feeling, is too bashfully employed. Supporting characters lack definition, like the cabbie who pitches a movie about a baby dropped into Vietnam ('It's a cross between Look Who's Talking and Apocalypse Now ').

Becca wonders if Chris's attachment to film, like her own, is 'unusually passionate'. Believe me, passion is not the problem. Becca often associates films with her dodgy ex-boyfriends and Chris with childhood memories, but they are buffs without conviction, without anything compelling to say.

In Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance, crackling sniping about Cassavetes sparks a new relationship; in What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe, exposure to guffawing British comedy shapes the hero's psyche. In contrast, Thorne's cast says nothing more taxing than you'd learn from an Empire sidebar. Minnows swimming in the shallows of the movie industry, and you long for an animated, absurd, cinéaste scrap.

Thorne's zippy but reticent style ripples along to a cute ending, but for comic obsession and amorous urgency you'd be better off grabbing your Slush Puppie and heading to a cinema.

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