Kissing Jessica Stein (15)

Romancing the Stein

Film critics don't tend to do "date movies", first because they've already seen everything, and second because – well, you'd have to see them at a press screening to understand why they spend so much time in the dark. Still, if I may make so bold, those on Planet Date should get themselves along to Kissing Jessica Stein, a wise, droll, deeply charming comedy of romantic misperception. You will also hear it dismissed as a chick flick, a tag which now seems to cover any movie that has two female leads. Whatever you want to call it, it's worth your time.

Skittish New York kook Jessica (Westfeldt) is a newspaper copy editor who wishes she could correct people's flaws as easily as she does their prose – she's too much the perfectionist, complains her mother up in Scarsdale, still longing to pair off her daughter with some nice Jewish Galahad. Now that her brother is getting married and her best friend is pregnant, Jessica feels the need for a romantic pal, and fancies she gets a sign when an ad "seeking adventure" in the personal column quotes her favourite bit of Rilke (this could only be Manhattan).

One snag: the pal is a gal, and Jessica is straight. Still, wouldn't it be better than all the "freaks and morons" she's been dating recently? What's the harm in trying? And, once the nerves settle, her quick drink with Helen (Juergensen) turns into dinner, which turns into kiss and then into, well, a sort of thing. Helen, assistant director of a downtown gallery, is everything Jessica isn't: cool, at ease with herself, bisexual. Jessica, nonplussed by her sudden leaning the other way, brings along a sex manual on their first date. "I was surprised to learn that lesbians accessorize", she coos, at which point you realise that she is less Carrie Bradshaw than Annie Hall, with exactly the same way of saying no ("nooo-o-o-o").

She also has the skewed Diane Keaton line on how analysis works, remarking of her inchoate lesbianism, "I could never tell my therapist. It's private". Yes, we've seen this flakiness before, and sense how it might become annoying, but Jennifer Westfeldt never overdoes the cutes: as Helen point out with exasperation, she's "nervous, neurotic, straight – she's the Jewish Sandra Dee!"

Kissing Jessica Stein is candid about sex without making an issue out of it; there's no proselytising for gay or straight. What the film does give its due is female friendship; it cheers the way two women can "bond" and feel affectionate towards one another, marking a notable contrast to the uneasy self-consciousness that might afflict two men, whose fear of homosexuality acts as an invisible chaperone between them. There's also a teasing comment on the male fantasy of two women together. When Helen and Jessica are chatted up by two jocks in a bar, Helen makes innocent and asks them to explain exactly why the fantasy is so appealing, all the while stroking the inside of Jessica's thigh beneath the table.

But it's not part of the film's plan to give men a drubbing, hapless and self-deluding though they may be. I liked the way Jessica's boss and one-time boyfriend Josh (Scott Cohen) starts out as a snarky, hard-as-nails type who calls her "Stein" as if he were Cary Grant trying to tell Rosalind Russell who's boss in His Girl Friday. Like Grant, he treats his ex as brusquely as he would a man, until he finally admits to himself that he's fallen back in love with her – or did he never fall out in the first place? Cohen has a lugubrious hang to his shoulders and a voice so eerily reminiscent of Alan Arkin that, by degrees, you begin to warm to him.

He's not the only character who sneaks up on us. Feisty Joan (Jackie Hoffman), Jessica's friend in the newsroom, wears maiden-aunt spectacles and bites off her lines with an exuberant flourish. More surprising still is Tovah Feldshuh as the Jewish mother who kvetches and meddles, a role which seems so done-to-death as to be incapable of making any impact at all (at one point she even says "oy"). But just because the role is a cliché, doesn't mean that it can't be truthful or tender, and the late scene in which Mrs Stein acknowledges what Jessica has dreaded telling her is one of the film's great affecting moments; Feldshuh quietly makes something remarkable of a stock character. I might have teared up had I not recalled the sharp words of Helen's friend on hearing her go all spoony about love: "Are you 12?"

Indeed, the script juggles adroitly between the romantic and the sceptic, allowing each its turn without giving either the upper hand. Where a more conventional movie would settle the argument, this one honours the uncertainty: no neat pairings-off, no violent ruptures, no promises. Sounds like the perfect date, let alone date movie.