An Almost Perfect Affair

Ritchie's last 'personal' (and, for that matter, interesting) movie before he went blandly commercial is, like his early work, a study in the ethics of competitive rivalry. Carradine (as fine as ever) plays a self-centred independent American film-maker who meets with cute Vitti during the Cannes Film Festival. How honest are his proclamations of love? Hard to tell, given that she is the wealthy ex-actress wife of Italian producer Vallone. A strangely disenchanted romantic comedy, the film impresses with its strong performances and its ambivalent attitude towards the emotional deceptions of its lovers, while there's a bonus for buffs in the in-jokes and documentary cameo-shots of various directors caught on location along the Croisette.