A quick recap of the storyline for those who haven’t yet polluted their eyeballs: Shields plays a best-selling American author called Sophie, who leaves New York for a trip to Scotland to write her new novel and visit a castle where her grandfather used to work as a groundskeeper. Early one morning, she cycles to the castle and meets a bad-tempered handyman in overalls, only for it to be revealed that the handyman in overalls is actually the 12th Duke of Dunbar, impoverished owner of said castle. They fall in love. The end.
Where to begin? The castle isn’t actually a castle. It’s Dalmeny House, owned by the Earl and Countess of Rosebery who, I hope, were paid a gargantuan sum of money for the use of their house, its interiors made to look like a Milton Keynes hotel which hosts mid-management away days. The film does include a three-second shot of an actual castle, Inveraray Castle, where the Duke and Duchess of Argyll live, which the director presumably included for trading standards purposes, but that’s about it on the castle front.
The Duke of Dunbar, played by Cary Elwes, has a Scottish accent, which is absurd because no Scottish duke has a Scottish accent unless they’re putting it on to talk to their ghillie. There was so much tartan I felt quite sick (tartan taxi, tartan walls, tartan rugs, tartan mugs, tartan towels and the duke, naturally, wears a tartan dressing gown), and Scotland appears as sunny as Tenerife every day. The pub seems to have a mad knitting club in permanent residence and, for Christmas Day itself, Dalmeny House is trussed up with so many decorations that it looks like one of those iridescent houses that appear in the newspapers at this time of year, under the headline “Neighbours from HELL”.
It’s also full of lines like this: “Castles are supposed to have walls around them, people aren’t.” Comically awful, but almost worth watching because it falls into the panoply of films that are so bad they’re good.
As it happens, last week I signed an agreement with a producer in LA for my first book to be developed into a film. That features a real castle, a duke, a shooting weekend and a Qatari sheikh who’s named all his labradors after British Royals. Give me a bell, Netflix, I’m sure we can work something out.
