Bachelor Girl

The title more or less spells out the entire plot of this mild Australian comedy about a 32 year old unmarried writer, currently working on episode #491 of a popular TV soap opera named 'Real World', whose own life, she believes, could use a dramatic rewrite. The same could be said for the script to the film itself, which is so bright and cheerful it seems mean to point out its shortcomings. Writer director Rivka Hartman shows a gift for self-deprecating humor (one of her heroine's fantasies is a guest appearance on a radio talk show called 'Let's Get Pretentious'), but the end product is often too cute for its own good, with pixilated sequences and coy animation devices (the sun yawning in the sky; a photo of Harpo Marx winking at the camera) lowering it to the level of a television sit-com pilot. Even with several funny lines and the occasional odd, offhand detail, it never rises above the undemanding level of sweet but negligible cotton candy fluff.