MOVIE REVIEW

Director Evan Richards' strangers-meet-cute film has all the makings of romance -- but none of the magic.

By Robert Abele, Special to The Times

The allure of a romantic two-hander in which an attractive pair of strangers spend a lot of time walking and talking and -- audiences usually hope -- heading in the direction of Happy Ending Land has made movie favorites out of everything from "Roman Holiday" to "Before Sunrise" to this year's indie hit "Once." Striving for that connective tingle but falling all too short of something swoony or deep or wittily satisfying, though, is American writer-director Evan Richards' London-set "In a Day," which devotes most of its brief 80 minutes to the morning-to-evening conversational ramble of a struggling female jazz musician and a male graphic designer.

The day starts rather harshly, actually, for Ashley (Lorraine Pilkington), who is minding her own business at a bus stop when a business-suited cad throws hot coffee on her for turning down his crude sexual advances. Stepping in to comfort her and -- like some lanky, insistent British sugar daddy -- buy her clothes, a fancy lunch and a salon appointment, and help her buy a gift for a needy friend, is kind stranger Michael (Finlay Robertson). Although he appears to know what she eats every night before going to bed and drags her to his verbally abusive sister's house for a weird visit -- which might be red flags to some wary women that he's either a stalker or at least a bizarre date -- Ashley warms to this eccentric wooer and his vague references to her earning a "great day."

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The leads have their moments, especially Pilkington, who has an appealingly modern sorrowfulness to her. But Richards' directing style of offbeat framing and dissonant edits feels like arty haphazardness, as if he thought a two-person movie needed help beyond the usual two-shots and close-ups. (It usually shouldn't.)

A bigger problem is that Richards rarely has the characters say anything entertaining or revealing or intriguing to each other, which robs the movie of momentum, a sense that each successive verse of their extended duet is building toward something natural and inevitable. A piggyback interlude in a park, for example, comes off as head-scratching rather than awww-inspiring. And the twisty reveal Richards does save for the end is a dispiriting bust, more like a meet-cute afterthought than something thematically resonant.

Richards is clearly aiming to say something about honesty and redemption, but what he mostly does is undermine his modest film's one strength: the notion that everyday human intimacy can be heightened by its seeming randomness. Romances thrive on magic; explanations are best left for murder mysteries.

"In a Day." Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Laemmle's Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.