THESE FOOLISH THINGS

Directed by Julia Taylor-Stanley. Starring Zoe Tapper, Anjelica Huston, Lauren Bacall, Terence Stamp, Joss Ackland 15A cert, Savoy, Dublin; IMC Dún Laoghaire; Omniplex, Cork, 106 min

IF These Foolish Things prompts a strong whiff of deja vu, that's because it is the third movie in two years - after Being Julia and Mrs Henderson Presents - to follow a woman's experiences in the London theatre world during the late 1930s, as the shadow of war looms.

Zoe Tapper blandly plays an ingénue, Diana Shaw, who, as a child, witnessed her mother swoon and die on the stage. Arriving in London with stars in her eyes, Diana has a few fortuitous encounters, with a struggling playwright (David Leon from Boy Eats Girl) and a kindly landlady (sweetly played by Julia McKenzie) whose house is festooned with theatre posters.

There are romantic complications when Diana is taken under the wing of an actor-turned-director (Andrew Lincoln). And she has to cope with the irrational, seething hatred of two gay men: her cousin, an unspeakable cad (Leo Bill), and his friend, a preening, predatory actor (Mark Umbers).

The movie is named after the musical standard performed several times in the picture. However,writer-director Julia Taylor-Stanley's broadly drawn, over-plotted screenplay needed more of the care and attention paid to the design of the costumes and theatrical milieu. As a result, this is a formulaic, innocuous yarn, with a underdeveloped air of dotty eccentricity that's seized upon in the two ripest, most entertaining performances.

Terence Stamp is an amusingly supercilious butler who uses tableware for shooting practice, while Anjelica Huston is vivaciously campy as a wealthy, champagne-swilling US theatrical investor with a penchant for hats as bizarre as her expressions, as when she declares, "I'm so hungry I could eat a herd of mustang." Michael Dwyer