Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Thu 1 Mar

Pawel Pawlikowski / France/Poland/UK / 2011 / 84mins

Pawel Pawlikowski picks up from his last two films My Summer of Love and Last Resort which both straddle charged relationships in tenuous circumstances to tell this part-literature indulgence, part-psychological drama. As university lecturer and writer Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) relocates to France to see his young daughter – despite a restraining order placed against him by his ex-wife – he meets Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) who revives his love for writing and ignites his sexual passion. But, just who is she?

Pawlikowski’s film starts off promisingly; Hawke’s character seems quite loving if not rash and it’s initially an intriguing tale of family politics and ill-fated relationships. In the small, decrepit hotel he is staying in on the outskirts of Paris, he meets Ania (Joanna Kulig), a young café waitress there who seems fascinated by him and by literature itself. This is the most engaging metaphor in the film – that literature has the capacity to both connect and divide people. In that sense, it’s a bit like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a dreamy rendezvous movie which celebrates language and romanticises Paris.

But the biting twist in the film (which follows Hawke being unable to provide an alibi for the murder of a man in the hotel) is predictably and annoyingly clichéd, the illustration of Paris weak and the overall storyline preposterous. He seems to just fall into relationships wherever he goes, his attraction as a miserable writer too much for women to resist – which is again an eye-rolling chestnut depiction. Surprising really as the audience will do well to ignore the glaring holes in Hawke’s French accent and his weird tendency to seemingly under and overact at the same time. By the end of the film, it looks as if Pawlikowski is exploring themes of desperate grief and ultimate acceptance and the sacrifice all great writers have to make in completing works of art; a fruitless sentiment really which will not impress its audience, it will merely baffle them.