CAKE TALE MORE SOGGY THAN SWEET
Love Sarah (cinemas nationwide, 12A)
Verdict: Half-baked ))***
In Her Hands (Curzon Home Cinema)
Verdict: Hits the right notes ))))*
THERE is nothing wrong with the ingredients in Love Sarah. This bittersweet ‘feelgood’ film about a Notting Hill bakery features the ever-dependable Celia Imrie (below), with Bill Paterson as her love interest. But it’s still a soggy-bottomed let-down.
Sarah, a baker of rare talent (fleetingly played by Great British Bake Off winner Candice Brown, a blinkand-you’ll-miss-it in-joke), is cycling through London on the way to open her new shop when she dies in a road accident. Imrie plays her uptight mother, Mimi, from whom Sarah was estranged, and Shannon Tarbet her daughter Clarissa, a dancer.
Following poor Sarah’s untimely demise, grandmother and granddaughter patch up their own differences and go into business with Sarah’s work partner Isabella (Shelley Conn), hiring Sarah’s old flame, a Michelin-starred chef (Rupert Penry-Jones) who might or might not be Clarissa’s biological father. They call their bakery Love Sarah, specialising — sweetly, if rather implausibly — in giving London’s many immigrant communities a Proustian taste of their homelands. It’s a confection I very much wanted to enjoy but a leaden script is compounded by some half-baked acting and an almost total lack of dramatic tension. A flavourless sponge of a film.
IN HER Hands is also about triumph against the odds but has all the warmth, heart and conviction that Love Sarah lacks.
It’s a French-language film starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a fierce piano teacher whose uniquely gifted charge is a young Parisian, Matthieu (Jules Benchetrit), who comes from an underprivileged background and has a disreputable set of friends.
When Matthieu is arrested for burglary, the director of the Paris Conservatory of Music (Lambert Wilson), having spotted him playing one of those railway-station pianos, arranges for him to do community service at the Conservatory.
From there the film follows a fairly predictable course, but it’s done with considerable panache.