This is a very funny romantic comedy which works because Jenny Seagrove musters her whimsicality and shows that she is an excellent comedienne with perfect comic timing. She plays a widow whose husband has died 18 months earlier unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving her and her children bereft and bewildered. She is a very attractive woman, and her lecherous dentist, played by Charles Dance, has designs upon her. Instead of injections, he uses hypnosis on his dental patients. In Seagrove's case, he goes beyond dentistry and while she is 'under' he makes increasingly naughty suggestions to her to assist him in his dastardly plans to seduce her and marry her. Anyone who does not believe that things like this can happen has only to read the book OPEN TO SUGGESTION, where many cases of such abuses are described. But back to the film. This hypnotic manipulation has some comic moments. At one point, while Seagrove is in the dental chair in a state of trance and Dance is called out suddenly, leaving the radio on, she accepts hypnotic instructions from a radio announcer, with comic consequences. Seagrove has mastered a wonderfully 'dipsy' expression which makes her hypnotically motivated adventures come across as hilarious. The man who is in love with her is played by an American actor named Anthony Edwards, who had just appeared in a successful American comedy called PLAYING BY HEART (1998). This light and enjoyable confection was directed by Willi Patterson, a TV drama director who had directed Charles Dance 11 years earlier in a TV movie spy drama, OUT OF THE SHADOWS (1988). For some reason, Patterson ceased being a director after this film and since 1999 has done nothing else in the film or TV business which is recorded on IMDb. He had a light touch which was very suited to gentle comedy, and this film works very well.
Review of Don't Go Breaking My Heart
