Richard Curtis has not always been a fabulously successful screenwriter. The creator of Blackadder, Mr Bean and Four Weddings and a Funeral was once as sad and depressed as the rest of us.

It was one particular period of loneliness that caused him to fantasise about what would happen if he were to turn up at the dinner party to which he was headed with a famous movie star on his arm.

The idea continued to fascinate him, and the result, several years later, is Notting Hill, a film about a man who does exactly that.

Hugh Grant is the man in question, and many have thus assumed that this new release is little more than a Four Weddings clone.

Actually, no-one could blame Curtis for wanting to clone his earlier film: it is, after all, the most commercially successful British movie of all time. But Notting Hill is a very different piece of work: a mature and funny love story which stands head and shoulders above the equivalent Hollywood product. Hugh plays William Thacker, a shambling but charming bookshop owner in London's Notting Hill.

Notting Hill to my recollection is untidy and faintly undesirable - but here it is dressed with red pillar boxes and photographed from behind cherry blossom trees. That's the way Americans like to imagine London, and Curtis clearly knows which side his bread's buttered. All that's missing is Dick Van Dyke dancing across the rooftops.

One leafy day, into William's shop walks Anna Scott (Julia Roberts), an incredibly famous Hollywood star in the Julia Roberts mould, who's in Britain promoting her latest film.

It's a brief encounter, but a contrivance of plot a few moments later sends William out for orange juice, and upon bumping into Miss Scott in the street, he spills a cup of it over her.

They return to his flat - an inhabited skip, or, in estate agent parlance, a property ripe for development - where she cleans up and changes her clothes. A day later, she telephones and invites him to her hotel.

Thus begins a tentative dating game. The scene Curtis had imagined previously, in which William turns up at his friends' dinner party with Miss Scott as his date, is impeccably timed and squirmingly funny, his companions reduced to behaving like gibbering morons in her presence - which one suspects they would do anyway.

"Is there much money in films?" asks Bernie (Hugh Bonneville), an idiot stockbroker who doesn't realise that William's date is famous. "How much did you make for your last film?"

"About 16 million dollars," she replies, and he goes away.

Later at the dinner table, she confesses her insecurities. "My looks will go, they'll discover I can't act and I'll be some sad, middle-aged woman who looks as if she was famous for a while." She gets no sympathy.

It's true, Hugh Grant plays essentially the same character he did in Four Weddings - but he does it extremely well. Nobody said he was a character actor. (And playing the same character in one film after another never did Terry-Thomas any harm).

For Hugh, the story does get uncomfortably close to home when he and Anna Scott are photographed by the press in compromising states of undress.

"Don't you realise?" she screams. "That picture will be filed. It's the one they'll pull out every time something's written about me." In the same way, no doubt, as that one of Hugh the Los Angeles Police took.

Notting Hill's only major fault is that it's 20 minutes too long. It's twee, certainly, but such is the price of commercialism - and it does not, after all, pretend to be anything other than mainstream entertainment for the transatlantic masses.

In that context it's charming, original and unpatronising - and not many romantic comedies can tick all those boxes.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.