a bit of a twit. No, as played with absolute abandon by Douglas
Henshall, he's a complete twit, a shaggy mess of a man who gets a second
chance at love.
As a disheveled, disorganized and distraught actor, Bukowski loses
Sylvia (Lena Headey), the longtime love of his life. It's his own fault;
he has a fling with an actress and feels compelled to confess the
infidelity. Sylvia moves out, meets an academic named David (Mark
Strong) at the gym and gets married-and all the groveling in the world
can't stop it. Good for Sylvia, to be rid of this egotistical lout, you
think.
But through the intercession of a pair of magical Gypsy trash
collectors, the actor gets to relive his past eight months and right all
his wrongs. He returns to the day of the confession-it's the day of the
Notting Hill Carnival-ends the affair, keeps Sylvia and gets a part in
one of those very hip British sitcoms.
He's on a roll, he knows it and you begin to resent him for it.
Then about 45 minutes into the movie, the happy couple meets
Sylvia's best friend and her date.
It's David, of course. And you know Sylvia is going to wind up with
him.
Henshall's Bukowski knows it, too. His double take is the recoil of
a dead man.
His face goes white. Rising helplessly, he knocks over his drink,
giving David the chance to be forgiving and superior in the same moment.
Bukowski sits down, without his future, but with our sympathy. And
that's just the beginning.
"If I played it too likable at the beginning, it would have cut
short the journey the character took," he said by phone from London,
where he's filming a television series. "I wanted people to be uncertain
they should like him. Then people are forced to think: 'Hold on. This is
a movie about how relationships actually are rather than how we'd like
them to be.'" Henshall would like the movie to be his breakthrough to
U.S. audiences-he just hired agents in New York and Los Angeles to find
parts-but he's willing to wait as he stars on British television in
"Psychos," a program he describes as "'ER' set in a mental hospital." In
his 30s (that's as exact as he wants to be about his age), he's a
veteran of the British stage-including a year with the Royal Shakespeare
Company, though he never did any Shakespeare there, getting as close as
the love poetry in Ben Jonson's "The Devil Is an Ass." Good notices in
the London production of David Mamet's play "American Buffalo" led to
movie roles, including a star turn in the Scottish drama "Orphan," which
hasn't been seen in the States.
Summer blockbuster season is not the easiest time for a small movie
to capture much attention-"Twice Upon a Yesterday" is playing at two
theaters in Manhattan and Brooklyn and will be heading soon to Long
Island. There are "Star Wars" and "Austin Powers" to contend with, of
course, and that other British romantic comedy set in Notting Hill.
Henshall said his movie is nothing like "Notting Hill." "Twice Upon a
Yesterday" is about magic and true love. "Notting Hill" is about fantasy
and true box office.
"I think if this film had been in the hands of certain other people,
I would have ended up back with Lena Headey again," Henshall said. "You
know, it would have been tied up with a nice, big saccharine ribbon."
There's another difference between the movies. The Notting Hill of
"Twice Upon a Yesterday" is the real multicultural, multiclass
neighborhood. "There are black people in our Notting Hill," Henshall
said. It was a neighborhood that appealed to Spanish director Maria
Ripoll and producer Juan Gordon, Henshall said.
"I doubt very much that a British filmmaker would dive into the
middle of the Notting Hill Carnival," he said. Carnival-think of the
Caribbean Day parade heading down Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn -is billed
as the largest street fair in the world.
"The whole sequence was supposed to be around a football tournament
in London.
When the director and the producer found out that Carnival was on,
they said, 'Why don't we make the premise the Carnival instead?' We went
and shot for the day there. It's an incredible feeling. They sent me
into the middle of this madness and said: 'Look, just improvise.' I mean
you can't ask 800,000 people to be quiet and you can't ask them to come
back tomorrow.
"They did a hand-held shot just following me up the road and when we
cut, I started going back up to the house \[for more filming\] and there
was a woman who came up and tugged me on the arm and said, 'Who are
you?' I said, 'What do you mean?' and she said, 'These people with the
camera have been following you around for hours.' And I said, 'Yeah,
well, we're making a movie,' and she said: 'Oh, is that all?' "I think
she thought it was something important."