A chance encounter in a hotel bar leads to a handsome novelist and a pretty analyst, both traveling for business reasons, forgetting their work for a few hours and make a night of it together upstairs.  Next morning as they part to go their separate ways they think no more of their one night stand and fly back to their respective home cities and partners.  She has a fiancee and is in the throws of wedding planning, and he has a long-term live-in girl-friend.

Almost a year later they bump into each other again by accident in another hotel in another city and spontaneously decide to have Round 2.  There is a real connection between the two  …. at this stage purely sexual  …. and as they both travel a great deal, they decide to occasional hook up when their schedules over-lap.

Over a indeterminate number of years they get to meet some 28 times and their no-strings trysts develop into a more emotional connection that neither had planned or expected. She is now married, and he eventually takes the plunge too, but the roller-coaster of feelings that they experience in these snatched moments may jeopardize all of this. Or in fact prove to be the life that they were meant to have? Towards the end, his writing career has fizzled out, and to please his wife, has moved from the bright lights of NY, to be a teacher in Maine. She on the other hand is a devoted mother but seemingly a reluctant wife now. The trouble is that neither can commit to each other, but they also are totally unable to call it quits.

This two-hander extremely romantic drama is completely engaging even though there are times you really want to shake some sense into these lovers.  It’s both intimate and passionate, and there’s a great deal of sex but discreetly photographed so the nudity itself doesn’t become too big a focal point. The language also gets very tough and frank at times.  It works as a piece far better than I expected because of the two actors Chris Messina and Marin Ireland who were pitch perfect as the unnamed lovers.

Written and directed by actor Matt Ross, it has all the wonderful freshness that comes with a newbie director’s debut film.  It will be interesting to see what he does next.

Highly recommended.

★★★★★★★★