FINDER OF LOST LOVES

REVIEWED - BROKEN FLOWERS: Don Johnson (played by Bill Murray), a middle-aged womaniser and confirmed bachelor, is immersed in watching Douglas Fairbanks in The Private Life of Don Juan when his latest lover (Julie Delpy) walks out on him at the outset of this charming new film

Johnson then receives a letter from a former lover, advising him that she had a son by him and that their offspring, now 19, may try to contact him.

The letter isn't signed, but encouraged by his Ethiopian, internet-sleuthing neighbour (Jeffrey Wright), Johnston embarks on a tour of the women in his life from 20 years earlier, bringing them flowers. In the classical road movie tradition, while trying to discover his son, Johnson discovers a great deal about himself.

The letter and the quest it triggers become secondary to a melancholy journey through his past, prompting "what if?" reflections on opportunities lost, for better or worse. This deceptively light serious comedy, sprinkled with droll throwaway humour and bittersweet observations, catches these reunions in all their different forms of awkwardness, embarrassment, and tenderness.

Looking even more hangdog and impassive than he was in Lost in Translation, Murray barely flickers an eyelid for most of the movie and yet manages to hold every scene with apparently effortless aplomb. And director Jim Jarmusch has lined up a superb troupe to play the women from his past: Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy and Tilda Swinton.

Much has been made of how accessible and even mainstream Broken Flowers is in comparison with Jarmusch's earlier films, given its greater popular success than any of them. It would be more accurate to observe that a substantial audience, nurtured by years of crossover hits from the independent sector, has finally found Jarmusch rather than the other way around.

Broken Flowers has his fingerprints all over it, in its sensitivity and humanity, its episodic structure and keen eye for telling incidental detail, and its penchant for understatement and idiosyncratic humour.

Directed by Jim Jarmsuch. Starring Bill Murray, Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, Tilda Swinton, Julie Delpy, Jeffrey Wright, Chloë Sevigny, Pell James 15A cert, lim release, 106 min