Best in entertainment for the long weekend

TVNZ 1, 8.30pm Sunday; TVNZ OnDemand

We still have a long way to go before the rest of the world stops seeing us as anything other than The Lord of the Rings — but Canadian-NZ coproduction A Love Yarn is another step on the path to Aotearoa also becoming internationally recognised as the setting of sweet, generic, easywatching rom coms.

It comes just a couple of years after Netflix’s Falling Inn Love, and the similarities don’t end at their cringeworthy almostbut-not-quite-a-pun titles. Where that one was about a city girl from San Francisco going to the Coromandel to renovate a dilapidated inn, for example, this one’s about a city boy from New York

coming to Matakana to audit the family farm.

Samuel has been sent over to see about closing down his aunt’s yarn mill because it’s not making the family enough money. That’s because the anti-capitalist Ida insists on selling all her lovely yarn to the local wool shop, owned by fellow American-Kiwi Sophie, instead of getting top dollar for it on the export market.

There are cultural misunderstandings. “I’m American, I can’t get enthusiastic about rugby,” Sophie tells her ruggermad Kiwi boyfriend after he refuses to wear the jumper she knitted him. “Yeah, well I can’t get enthusiastic about knitting or wool,” he counters in what is easily the most intense exchange of the whole film. They call the whole thing off, leaving the door open for Sam to win Sophie’s heart via unsolicited marketing advice.

The cosy, familiar story ambles along so mildly that it almost feels like a radical act of film-making. No one dies, nothing bad really happens to anyone and if you fall asleep on the couch after five minutes then wake up in the middle of the Maker’s Fair, you’ll still be able to enjoy the thoroughly satisfying ending.