French Kiss
This lightweight but enjoyable - there, I said it - Ryan/Kline vehicle came out in the mid nineties and I saw a trailer for it in which the voiceover was largely as in the link but it ended: "there's just one thing he didn't tell her... he isn't French."

Somehow, years later, I ended up watching it at somebody's house and, since it had been chosen in advance by somebody's girlfriend and nobody knew anything about the plot that wasn't on the box, I thought myself very smart for being in the know about such a major plot point. Not being a total penis, I didn't blurt out anything during the film but I did spend a lot of it making mental notes of things I would comment on later. "Yeah," I planned to observe in an urbane fashion. "A real Frenchman wouldn't have stolen a Citroen. It's unpatriotic. Big giveaway." Anyway, the movie wore on, Meg met Kevin, they pratted about through a series of mildly racist escapades, he stole a Citroen and they fell in love, and I began to think, hang on pineapplecharm my old chum, we're an hour into a 90 minute film and the big reveal from the trailer hasn't happened yet. What did they do, give away the big surprise ending in the trailer?! And what a crap ending - surely if he isn't French the audience, at least, should know early on so we can have lots of dramatic tension surrounding Kline's increasing difficulty with keeping his deception quiet! When are we going to see him wincing at the taste of stinky cheese, or refusing a cigarette? When is Ryan's character going to notice that he quite likes her shaved underarms and doesn't chew raw garlic while swilling red wine on long car journeys?

It was probably at the moment when he was showing around the vineyard he inherited that I realised I must have seen an early trailer, one of those mythical things that comes out before a critical test screening where people fill out cards with damning opinions that send a film back into the editing suite for drastic reshaping. I was lied to by a false spoiler! How in God's name was I supposed to look all sophisticated in front of my friends now? I'd sat through a stupid rom com for nothing!

I have never quite forgiven Kevin Kline for not not being French.
( pineapplecharm D d M Y, H:i, Thu 6 Jun 2013, 18:18, Reply)