Addicted To Love

This comedy also stars Matthew Broderick, as well as Kelly Preston, Tcheky Karyo and Maureen Stapleton,

Addicted To Love is about failed love affairs, falling in love and revenge, not necessarily in that order.

Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick play Maggie and Sam who have been jilted by their lovers; Anton, played by Tcheky Karyo and Linda, played by Kelly Preston. Maggie and Sam set up a spy station across a New York street from the flat where Anton and Linda now live.

Sam is still besotted by his boyhood love Linda and wants her back. Maggie is after revenge and wants to ruin Anton. Anton and Linda meanwhile show every sign of being besotted and happy with one another, much to the displeasure of Maggie And Sam.

So what's the twist, because this sounds like pretty standard fare. Well, the twist is more an inversion than a twist because Sam is an astronomer who sets up a "camera obscura" to spy on Anton and Linda.

A camera obscura is a device which collects light through a small hole and then projects the image upside down through the hole.

A clever astronomer like Sam can invert and brighten that image and have real life action from across the street projected onto his own wall.

He analyses Linda and Anton's relationship, as a star gazer will study a galaxy, so that he can predict and react properly to the break up he just knows will happen between his former girlfriend and her new lover.

Maggie joins him with her own equipment; bugging gear which provides sound from across the street, and these two jilted lovers have the sound and motion of their quarries projected before them; a situation that provides all sorts of comic and anguished possibilities, and also a very memorable story device indeed.

Plots are hatched and enacted by Maggie and Sam, while they have in stereo, and in full view, the romantic notions and motions of the Anton and Linda! I would love to have that equipment!

It would be even better sometimes than going to the movies. Both Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan are appealing in Addicted To Love and fit nicely into the romantic comedy mould, (you could argue that Meg Ryan was hatched for these parts), although Broderick seems to lack a little spice and conversely Meg Ryan could have done with a little less, especially as the film passes out of a very lively and light first third.

We soon realise that perhaps Maggie and Sam might have possibilities together, but there's also Anton and Linda to consider. Tcheky Karyo as Anton really shines.

French actor Tcheky Karyo was the trainer of assassins in one of my favourite movies, Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, which was remade rather tamely by the Americans, and almost shot for shot, as The Assassin starring Bridget (I can't help it if I am beautiful) Fonda.

In Addicted To Love, Karyo is very impressive as a big bear of an impulsive French restauranteur, a performance that will probably earn him more offers in American films.