A Paris Proposal

I was so looking forward to this movie. I really like Alexa PenaVega and the movie was filmed in Paris. Beautiful city and great food.

The movie is about two advertising people trying to get a major France jewelry account and accidentally pose as a married couple. The ads looked funny, but although the one-liners were cute, there was no chemistry between the actors.

I watched for half the movie and gave up. The characters were sooo boring, the story was sooo boring, no chemistry and I just couldn't keep any interest. Terribly disappointed. Total Meh movie.

Hopefully Hallmark starts doing better movies for Alexa PenaVega.

This Hallmark romance begins with a familiar situation: coworkers who go together like oil and water. Anna (Alexa PennVega) and Sebastian (Nicholas Bishop) work for a New York ad agency. When they are sent to Paris to sell an important new French client, a small mistake results in the impression that they are married. To their consternation, their charade snowballs, until it threatens everything, including personal relationships.

PennVega and Bishop work well together. Others in the cast have their moments---especially Elie Kaempfen as Andre the hotel clerk who adds some moments of light comedy.

The conflict in the film resolves fairly quickly, but the final scenes are satisfying.

Anna Bowman (Alexa PenaVega) and Sebastian Laurent (Nicholas Bishop) are co-workers in an advertising agency and they don't get along. She's a by-the-numbers account manager and he's the creative kind. They are forced to team up for a pitch in Paris. A misunderstanding leads the clients to assume that they are married.

This is a Hallmark romance. It is a little funny when he's insulting her. This is a fine standard fire-and-ice coupling. They need to fight more. I don't get her outfit with the big front flower. She should be dressed like an accountant. That's the premise. They need to stick to it. All in all, this is fine for Hallmark and we get a Paris vacation on top of it.

We have here the start of a classic antipathetic romance, and unlike most antipathetic romances in these Hallmark movies, the writers had the courage to carry the tense relationship deep into the movie ... almost to the end, in fact.

The man (a Frenchman with a disaster in his family's business) develops exorbitantly expensive ideas for ad campaigns. The woman (with a one year disaster of a marriage in her past) is practical and keeps her ad campaign ideas sensible.

Together they're assigned to travel to Paris to secure the account of a French diamond jewelry house who wants to expand into the USA.

The story of their conflicting ideas for the ad campaign needed to win the account drives the movie, and in the end they come to an mutual idea surprisingly easily.

However, the movie is charming, in my mind more because of the older French couple who own the diamond house than the stars.

7.4 stars.

We are very familiar with this plot, two people are acquainted, co-workers, or friends etc... they pretend to be dating, engaged, or married etc... "A Paris Proposal" happens to take place in a city in France, can't quite remember the name....the two subjects are co-workers with polar opposite personalities. They work for an American company, although he is French, artistic and worldly, whereas she is American, analytical and perfectionistic. Match made in heaven. He has a very strong accent, but it's polished enough that he is understandable.

They fly to Paris and are in the middle of a sales pitch with a major jeweler, when a slight coincidence leads them down a rabbit hole of lies. In the spur of the moment they make the best of a difficult situation, but are now stuck pretending to be married in order to score the deal. Are they capable of fooling everyone, including the antagonist? As the stakes get higher, the ruse begins to unravel.

The leads have sufficient chemistry to make this an interesting film. It is somewhat entertaining, and the background is picturesque with the incomparable cityscape of Paris. Some of the dialogue is lost in translation; you can detect many innuendos and interactions being studded with French influence. That aside, "A Paris Proposal" is charming and delightful. The allure of PenaVega wearing a $23 Million dollar pink diamond and a fashionable dress was reason enough to stick around. Unfortunately, something intangible is missing.