French Kiss

Meg Ryan can’t accompany her fiancée, Timothy Hutton, on a trip to Paris because of a terrible fear of flying. So he goes alone, and he soon informs her, by trans-Atlantic phone call, that he has fallen wildly in love with a French girl. (If there were text messages back then, he probably would have broken up with her that way, that’s how much of a shit-heel he is.) She is determined to win him back, and conquers her fear long enough to get on a plane, where her seat mate is a French thief and con man, Kevin Kline, who puts contraband into her purse to get through customs. She gets robbed, and is in Paris without money, passport, or a change of clothes. He chases after her to try to get his stuff back. So they are thrown into close proximity for a few days, take a train to Cannes, where she confronts Tim, who realizes he really wants Meg, not the French model. And she realizes she doesn’t want him, but is in love with Kevin.

Oh, sorry …SPOILER WARNING! I guess that should have been up there in the previous paragraph somewhere, but if you didn’t know from the first moment Kevin sat down next to her that they would be passionately kissing in the last minute of the film … well, I feel sorry for you.

Just because a romantic comedy is made according to the rather predictable patterns of the genre doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable. There are no surprises here, but we liked it well enough. Considering the many horrible “romantic comedies” being made these days, you could do a lot worse.