An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from the damned thing but since I have a weak spot for Bracha van Doesburgh, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, first of all, van Doesburgh had eventually a very small and completely half-baked character. On top of that, such Dutch romantic comedies are always seriously derivative and this one wasn’t an exception, I’m afraid. Indeed, in this case, it turned out to be some kind of mix of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ with ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’. And, yet, even if the concept was pretty weak, the damned thing was actually not bad at all, at least, it was much better than most similar Dutch productions. Above all, all the characters turned out to be fairly well developed which was even more impressive since, considering the short running time, there was actually very little time to spend on each of them. The other thing I enjoyed was Tjitske Reidinga (jezzz… with such a name, she can pretty much forget about a career outside the Netherlands) as she was pretty much pitch-perfect here. Sure, her character was basically a Bridget Jones knock-off but I think she was actually even better than Renée Zellweger in her star-making performance. It’s such a tricky thing to portray a completely ordinary woman and yet make her charismatic enough but Reidinga really nailed this tricky balancing act. It’s too bad that the whole concept of having her falling in love completely out of the blue with her best friend, someone she knew for decades, was just so weak. Anyway, to conclude, even though the damned thing should have been a complete failure, it turned out to be a decent watch after all and I think it is actually worth a look, at least, if you really like the genre.

6/10