Two for Tea

Regardless of it billing, this grim Catalan 'romantic comedy' is neither funny nor romantic. It charts the blossoming of a problematic relationship between a successful novelist who has just returned to Barcelona amid accusations that she's exploited and betrayed friends as research material for her books, and an Indian florist's assistant. Not only do religious, cultural and gender differences get in the way of an otherwise satisfying affair, but the novelist's parents are as upset by the fling as those in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner - which is occasionally echoed in this naive, annoyingly didactic, even sometimes unwittingly racist dross. One of those self-consciously 'modern' Spanish films in which the heroine and her friends are all ludicrously into sexual liberation, drugs, art, and other fashionable hedonisms, it's actually as old fashioned and unappealing as a threadbare afghan.