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Very British film comedy-romance-drama about immigrants trying to 'make it' in Britian. In the same way that 'My Beautiful Launderette' was hard to categorise as straight romance or straight comedy, so is this, but perhaps it lacks the political bite of the earlier film. However it does feature a likeable lead performance and a plot with enough inertia to keep thickening.

The rather linear and limited appearance of Juliette Lewis is a bit of a mystery. I would suggest she was placed in the film, in the same way that 'Four Weddings And a Funeral' wanted an American actress in order to boost box-office. The trouble is: Juliette Lewis has spoken at length about her enjoyment of the script and how seriously she took the role. Yet her role seems very slight and a little bit of a blind alley. If the Mariyln Monroe impersonator looked and sounded little like Marilyn off-stage (perhaps with a Birmingham, England accent) it would have made more sense and the lead character's love of her would have made his character even more sweetly innocent and endearing.

The last half hour of the film seems to have come from an entirely different script, more fantastical and yet more serious at the same time. Perhaps this is the influence of the literary genre, magical-realism but regardless, it does make for a film that goes somewhere you weren't expecting and how often can you say that about a film?