Sex & Chocolate

A woman struggling with her self image ("When you look at me do you just see a Mom?") gets a boost when an old flame comes to town & shows his interest.

How refreshing to see such a movie portrayed by "regular" people as opposed to "Baywatch" clones. The acting is superb by Dawn French as the wife & Michael Maloney as the old beau (there are no real villains here) - & particularly by Phil Daniels as the husband - who offers a heart-wrenching depiction of a man who fears he may be losing the woman he desperately loves. Sweet, funny & uplifting.

This was well acted by all concerned with some well-written exchanges but the basic premise and plot development is very unconvincing, to say the least. The infatuation of her would-be lover is so sudden as to be implausible. One brief meeting in public after 20 years and he's full-on stalking the poor woman. He turns up, making himself very conspicuous, outside her home and also, using a fake identity no less, at the school where she works, all the while pushing the downright stupid request that she leave her family to go off to Paris with him. It's not 90s romcom cutesy, it's just bizarre. You don't want to laugh at the character's off-the-wall wooing, as seems to be the writer's intention, you want to restrain his aggressive, if not sociopathic, invasion of someone else's life. It's pretty damining to say it but the dissatisfied/tempted housewife thing was done with more subtlety in the dreadful Butterflies sitcom.