Vain search for a light touch

Then She Found Me (M) 3 stars Limited national release WHEN actors try their hand at directing, there's always the feeling they do so because they aren't being offered interesting roles, so they have decided to create one for themselves. It's sometimes referred to as a vanity project.

Matthew Broderick plays an immature husband who breaks up with Helen Hunt in Then She Found Me

Then She Found Me (M) 3 stars Limited national release WHEN actors try their hand at directing, there's always the feeling they do so because they aren't being offered interesting roles, so they have decided to create one for themselves. It's sometimes referred to as a vanity project.

You could describe Helen Hunt's directorial debut, Then She Found Me, in those terms except for the fact Hunt -- who appears in the film, and also co-scripted and co-produced it -- is fairly harsh on herself. She plays a 39-year-old woman who desperately wants a baby -- she is a brittle, angry character -- and it's unsettling to have such a person at the centre of what's presumably supposed to be a romantic comedy. Nor is she always flatteringly photographed: this is a warts-and-all depiction.

Hunt, in this adaptation by herself, Alice Arlen and Victor Levin of a book by Elinor Lipman, is April Epner, a New York schoolteacher with a sick, elderly mother, Trudy (Lynn Cohen), and an immature husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick).

April wants to have a baby of her own. She's aware that she was adopted, but is determined not to adopt a child herself; the more Trudy urges her to adopt a Chinese baby, the more April rejects the idea. Then, in a short space of time, she loses the two people closest to her: Trudy dies, and Ben announces that the marriage is over and he's leaving. But not before the couple has one, last, passionate coupling (a scene that, coming early in the film, plays awkwardly because it's so unconvincing).

Luckily for the shattered April, replacements are at hand. In no time at all she meets Frank (Colin Firth), an Englishman whose wife abandoned him for another woman and left him with two small children, one of whom attends April's school. Frank is as funny, charming and sexy as only Firth can make him, and if it weren't for a minor complication I won't go into, April's personal life would seem to be back on an evenkeel.

The other replacement is Bernice (Bette Midler), an ebullient, extroverted television host who arrives out of nowhere claiming to be April's real mother (and asserting that her father was none other than Hollywood star Steve McQueen, and that April was the result of a one-night stand back in the late 1960s).

Thank goodness for Firth and Midler because they bring much needed vitality to this otherwise rather glum comedy. Firth's comedic timing is impeccable and Midler is as energetic and boisterous as ever; alongside the gaunt, ravaged Hunt, she positively sparkles.

In the end, though, the film is strangely unsympathetic. April's dreams and desires prove elusive, and unwelcome compromises are imposed on the character. To its credit, this is a romantic comedy with a more serious side than most. But in her seriousness, Hunt loses sight of the need for laughter.

Mention should be made of one of the oddest pieces of casting in recent times. Who should turn up as April's gynaecologist but author Salman Rushdie? It's such an unusual choice that you find yourself wondering why Hunt made it and, as a result, it's difficult to concentrate on the scenes in which Rushdie appears. Yet this off-the-wall casting fits with the film as a whole: it's rather strange and unsettling.