5 to 7

It's always frustrating to see an indie rom-com aspiring to be little more than a hipper, more sophisticated version of You've Got Mail. This improbable upper-middle-class fantasy-romance features what may be one of the most well-heeled struggling writers in cinematic history: Brian Bloom, who is played with a combination of youthful vulnerability and privileged smugness by Anton Yelchin. We never learn how Bloom manages to live in a luxury midtown studio flat despite being a serial-rejection fiction writer, but while strolling the high-end streets of NYC for inspiration he spots a dark-haired Gallic goddess on a smoke break outside her place of work and decides to strike up a dull conversation. Amazingly, the sophisticated 33-year-old ex-model (played by former Bond girl Bérénice Marlohe) inexplicably enjoys Brian's emotionally needy social patter. After a few dates, she tells him she's married, but asks if he's interested in a lovers' tryst from 5 to 7 in the evening, the time when cheating on her impotent diplomat husband would be most convenient. What should have been a hot and steamy affair ends up onscreen like some sort of prudish Eisenhower-era document of a back-door relationship. Writer-director Victor Levin's attempts at humor (and, by turns, pathos) overreach for rarified Woody Allen/Whit Stillman heights, but the tin-eared dialogue and unimaginative direction here unfortunately smack of bottom-of-the-barrel amateurism. Not a necessary purchase. (M. Sandlin)