Genre: drama, romance

Wicker Park

Directed by Paul McGuigan

Written by Brandon Boyce

and Gilles Mimouni

Starring Josh Hartnett,

Rose Byrne, Diane Kruger

Classification: PG

Rating: **

If plot were oats, Wicker Park would choke a horse. There are bushels of the stuff here, some of it hard to decipher, most of it impossible to summarize, and all of it devoted to love's many-splendoured thingy -- to mad love, unrequited love, tepid love, enduring love, love at first sight. But don't make the mistake of calling the result a love story -- better to call Notre Dame a chapel. Nope, this Gothic tower is a twisting, turning, spiralling whole lotta love story.

And there's more. It's also a suspense yarn, boasting a bunch of deliberate Hitchcockian quotes tossed in to eliminate any residual confusion. Why the confusion, you might ask? Well, that's the really weird part: Structurally, the movie resembles nothing more than an old-fashioned romance comedy -- chock-a-block with confused identities and wild coincidences and crucial miscommunications.

Of course, none of this is meant to be funny, but since comedic structures have a way of producing comedic results, I offer a fair warning: Like eating beans before the opera, you may suffer the embarrassment of unfortunate outbursts at inappropriate moments -- in short, be prepared to laugh in all the wrong places.

Now add this up -- the thick plot, the mega-love story, the suspenseful mood, the comic shaping -- and the tally amounts to something I've never encountered before. A drawing-room thriller, perhaps, yet that doesn't quite capture the oddity. It may help a little to know that the script is a loose rip-off of an earlier French film titled L'Appartement, if only because Hollywood's modus operandi in these European thefts is ever predictable: Swipe everything except the style, the atmosphere and the nuance that made the original unique.

The setting has switched to a wintry Chicago, where director Paul McGuigan (Gangster No. 1, The Acid House) begins effectively enough by zooming in on the anxious mug of his troubled hero. Dining out at a posh restaurant, poor Matthew (Josh Hartnett) is displaying a scant appetite either for the food before him or his fiancée beside him. Leaving the table for the washroom, our sad sack thinks he catches a fleeting glimpse of Lisa, a woman who does make his pulse quicken. Or did, two long years ago, before she dumped him and disappeared with nary an explanation. The glimpse ends, the woman vanishes, Matthew races off, and the hunt is on. His search for her, and for that explanation, gives the movie its main narrative arc.

The arc is fine -- it's the intermediate geometry that grows absurdly complicated. Right away, McGuigan starts flashing to and fro in time, consistently intercutting between Matthew's infatuation in the past and his pursuit in the present. En route, the other principals are introduced: his randy buddy Luke (Matthew Lillard), who has a desperate crush on Alex the wannabe actress (Rose Byrne), who, for her part, appears to be taking an undue interest in Matthew, even as the ever-elusive Lisa remains at large. Pretty soon, we're looking straight into the eight eyes of a love quadrangle -- actually, a love pentagon, if you count that forgotten fiancée from the opening frame.

Figuring out this elaborate human geometry -- who's deceiving who and why -- is meant to give the movie its intrigue. But drawing up intricate ménages is one thing; making them credible is another. Alas, that's exactly the point where the hokey coincidences, the convenient miscommunications and, inevitably, our impolite laughter come into play. When Euclid gets applied to people, the theory may be pretty but the reality is risible.

Faced with trying to beautify this narrative mess, McGuigan does little more than run a quick comb through the tangle, throwing in the usual quota of mirror-imagery and, on those rare occasions when the plot makes room for passion, shooting the sex scenes through a lens gauzily.

His luck with casting isn't much better. Hartnett is to acting what the flat line is to the heart monitor -- you keep hoping, but there's just nothing going on. And when Lisa finally pops up, darned if she isn't that Helen from that Troy -- yes, Diane Kruger, a mere beauty best kept out of movies and confined to trailers, content to be the face that launched a thousand clips.

Make that 1,001, although the trailer doesn't begin to do justice to Wicker Park. Rightly positioned at the fag end of the summer, this is a fat exploding cigar of a picture -- it has to be seen to be disbelieved.