Sliding Doors

I remember all the fuss about this film at the time because it was directed by blonde heart-throb Peter Howitt, famed as “Joey” from the hit BBC sitcom “Bread”. Ha also wrote the screenplay and the concept is really quite decent. “Helen” (Gwyneth Paltrow) leaves her boyfriend “Gerry” (John Lynch) in bed and races for a tube. The doors are closing but will she make it or not? Well in one version of her future she does and in another, she doesn’t. One sees her befriend the charismatic “James” (John Hannah); the other sees her struggle on with her relationship with a man that we know, right from the start, is having a relationship with the delightfully dislikeable “Lydia” (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Fortunately, Miss Paltrow sports different hairstyles to help us distinguish between her characters as serendipity - benevolent and malign - offers us two shapes to her life that overlap occasionally but leave us in no doubt that “Gerry” is a selfish ass and that “James” is the type you’d want to take home to meet mum. The problem for me was that once we had got the two stories up and running, they became just a bit too soapy. Of course it would never have worked had all gone smoothly, but the grenades thrown in to disrupt love’s young dream and even love’s young treachery are all just a bit too predictable. That said, though, I did quite like the way the last five minutes were structured to mix the conclusion with a little déjà vu. It’s a film about choices, some informed and some not and it’s also about trust and how easily it is to betray and manipulate in a relationship where trust is assumed but not deserved. Hannah probably has the best of the gentle humour and there’s just enough of that; some energetic rowing and even some sexually-charged brandy-swilling to keep it watchable.