Sam, (Matthew Broderick) is a small town astrologer who has been hopelessly in love and besotted with his girlfriend Linda (Kelly Preston) since they were kids.
When Linda, a grade school teacher, gets the chance to spread her wings and teach in New York for a few months, Sam rather reluctantly accepts the situation and sadly sees her off.
Yet when Linda fails to return after her secondment ends and instead sends around her father with a 'Dear John' letter, Sam journeys to New York to find out why the love of his life has unceremoniously dumped him.
It turns out she has fallen in love and shacked up with a handsome French restauranteur named Anton (Tchéky Karyo)
Unlike most blokes who would just go to the pub, cry into a few beers, lament their lost love for a few weeks, go through a period of readjustment and healing, before moving on with their life, Sam breaks into the derelict apartment building across the street and spends his days spying on his ex girlfriend and her lover.
Using a camera obscura he has full view of their apartment, and using his talent for data analysis he plans to mathematically work out the peak and eventual demise of her new relationship and he is determined to be the one who's shoulder she will cry on and to whom she will eventually return. He is willing to forgive her temporary lapse and resume their relationship as if nothing had happened.
Enter Maggie (Meg Ryan) a leather clad biker chick and Anton's spurned lover, who is also stalking her former partner, however reconciliation does not feature in her plans at all. She is purely out for revenge and wants to destroy Anton's life. Anton had shamelessly used her just to get a green card and now suspects Linda is his next victim.
Sam wants nothing to do with Maggie's scheme of destroying Anton, he only wants back what he 'stole' from him and the two get off to an acrimonious start.
What makes Sam agree to letting Maggie stay is that she has placed some strategic state of the art bugging equipment around Anton and Linda's apartment so wheras Sam has provided the window into Linda and Anton's life, Maggie has provided the soundtrack.
When Sam finally hears his true love and her French paramour having wild and passionate sex it riles him so much, that he join forces with Maggie to ruin Anton's life and claim back his sweetheart.
They do this by rousing Linda's suspicions of an affair using several ingenious and humorous schemes, they ruin Anton's budding restaurant business and steal his credit card to leave him with astronomical debts.
Obviously as this is a Romcom, you know where this is going to lead. Maggie and Sam slowly start to fall in love themselves. Sam realises that he no longer wants what he thought he did, and for Maggie, revenge becomes less and less important.
They also both come to realise that Anton and Linda are genuinely in love with each other, and that their previous relationships fell apart because they were not with the right person to begin with.
Anton had used Maggie to get a green card, but it turns out he was guilt ridden over being so dishonest with her, he desperately wanted to fall in love with Maggie to make things right, but it just didn't happen. He let her go because he couldn't lie to her or himself anymore. Turns out he's not such a bad chap after all.
I think it was a master stoke in bringing a great bit of reverse psychology to film, . The more we see of our supposed love cheats, the more we sympathise with them and realise we've judged them to harshly without knowing the full story. We actually start to feel sort for what is maliciously being done to them.
Of course the flip side of that is we lose sympathy with our main protagonists (or rather antagonists) who are supposed to be the leading man and leading lady of the whole show..the people we should be rooting for. Of course they are stalkers pure and simple and were never worthy of much sympathy to begin with.
It's still an entertaining film however and we never truly abandon sympathy for the spurned lovers, even if we do gain a lot more for those that did the original spurning.
Final comment :- Meg Ryan was always beautiful, but in my opinion in this movie she is just downright sexy. If Meg looked sexier in any other film then I sure as hell haven't seen it.
When Linda, a grade school teacher, gets the chance to spread her wings and teach in New York for a few months, Sam rather reluctantly accepts the situation and sadly sees her off.
Yet when Linda fails to return after her secondment ends and instead sends around her father with a 'Dear John' letter, Sam journeys to New York to find out why the love of his life has unceremoniously dumped him.
It turns out she has fallen in love and shacked up with a handsome French restauranteur named Anton (Tchéky Karyo)
Unlike most blokes who would just go to the pub, cry into a few beers, lament their lost love for a few weeks, go through a period of readjustment and healing, before moving on with their life, Sam breaks into the derelict apartment building across the street and spends his days spying on his ex girlfriend and her lover.
Using a camera obscura he has full view of their apartment, and using his talent for data analysis he plans to mathematically work out the peak and eventual demise of her new relationship and he is determined to be the one who's shoulder she will cry on and to whom she will eventually return. He is willing to forgive her temporary lapse and resume their relationship as if nothing had happened.
Enter Maggie (Meg Ryan) a leather clad biker chick and Anton's spurned lover, who is also stalking her former partner, however reconciliation does not feature in her plans at all. She is purely out for revenge and wants to destroy Anton's life. Anton had shamelessly used her just to get a green card and now suspects Linda is his next victim.
Sam wants nothing to do with Maggie's scheme of destroying Anton, he only wants back what he 'stole' from him and the two get off to an acrimonious start.
What makes Sam agree to letting Maggie stay is that she has placed some strategic state of the art bugging equipment around Anton and Linda's apartment so wheras Sam has provided the window into Linda and Anton's life, Maggie has provided the soundtrack.
When Sam finally hears his true love and her French paramour having wild and passionate sex it riles him so much, that he join forces with Maggie to ruin Anton's life and claim back his sweetheart.
They do this by rousing Linda's suspicions of an affair using several ingenious and humorous schemes, they ruin Anton's budding restaurant business and steal his credit card to leave him with astronomical debts.
Obviously as this is a Romcom, you know where this is going to lead. Maggie and Sam slowly start to fall in love themselves. Sam realises that he no longer wants what he thought he did, and for Maggie, revenge becomes less and less important.
They also both come to realise that Anton and Linda are genuinely in love with each other, and that their previous relationships fell apart because they were not with the right person to begin with.
Anton had used Maggie to get a green card, but it turns out he was guilt ridden over being so dishonest with her, he desperately wanted to fall in love with Maggie to make things right, but it just didn't happen. He let her go because he couldn't lie to her or himself anymore. Turns out he's not such a bad chap after all.
I think it was a master stoke in bringing a great bit of reverse psychology to film, . The more we see of our supposed love cheats, the more we sympathise with them and realise we've judged them to harshly without knowing the full story. We actually start to feel sort for what is maliciously being done to them.
Of course the flip side of that is we lose sympathy with our main protagonists (or rather antagonists) who are supposed to be the leading man and leading lady of the whole show..the people we should be rooting for. Of course they are stalkers pure and simple and were never worthy of much sympathy to begin with.
It's still an entertaining film however and we never truly abandon sympathy for the spurned lovers, even if we do gain a lot more for those that did the original spurning.
Final comment :- Meg Ryan was always beautiful, but in my opinion in this movie she is just downright sexy. If Meg looked sexier in any other film then I sure as hell haven't seen it.