CINEMA

Some of us have spent years trashing our chances of happiness because life just can't measure up to the movies and the movies' synthetic but certain vision of romance: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Cue happy ending. Hot, raging, r eal love, the sort that violates not only our hearts but also our standards and style, can't be decanted into such a tidy formula. And we think the fault lies with us, Horatio, not in the stars.

Well, we did until Only You crawled along. It wants to be Sleepless in Seattle and ends up Irritated in Italy: never mind the script (Marisa Tomei, right, spends her lifetime - and yours - putting a face to a name she's already fallen for), look at the scenery and Robert Downey Jr's huge and frightening butt: does that thing have plans for world domination or what? Yet for all its faults - the wise and witty waiters advising the heartbroken, the syrupy score, Tomei widening her bovine brown eyes to denote...well, everything and anything - the picture's swoony allure still ought to get by; it always has before.

Yet watching, impatience can barely be contained. In a time of rocketing divorce, serial monogamy, open relationships and one-parent families - a time when no one believes in forever anymore - Only You's "freshness" seems a relic. Living in an age where jobs are no longer for life, how can the film expect us to swallow the notion that passion springs eternal? Only You only wants to return us to the first flush of love, and, cruelly, inadvertently, inevitably, merely reminds us how cynical - how grown-up- we've become.