Sliding Doors (1998)

Sliding Doors arrives from 1998, a year when a London publicist could be sacked, catch or miss a train, and have her fate hinge on the sliding doors of the Underground. Peter Howitt's gimmick is elegant enough: two Helens, one life split down the middle, Gwyneth Paltrow in a bob and then in a bleached crop. The film is a romantic comedy with a structural conceit, and it never pretends to be anything else. That restraint is its saving grace. There is no sermon waiting in the wings, no pause to instruct us on the moral failings of the age. It simply wants us to watch a woman be unlucky in two directions at once.

The social consciousness here is mild and mostly incidental. Helen leaves a cheating boyfriend, cuts her hair, starts her own small PR firm, and declines to be defined by the men who let her down. That is standard romantic-comedy agency, the sort of thing the genre had been offering since the 1930s. It registers as empowerment only because the bar has always been low. The cast is uniformly white and comfortably middle-class, the romantic conflicts entirely heterosexual, and the film has no interest in race, class grievance, climate, or the body as a political site. London exists as a backdrop of tube stations and pubs, not as contested social terrain.

What remains is craft. John Hannah is charming, the dual timelines converge with a clean emotional logic, and the whole thing runs on a joke about the Spanish Inquisition. It is a modest film that knows its own scale. We are left with a pleasant artifact of late-nineties British cinema, unserious about everything except the ache of bad timing.