But instead of making a big brash meal of the role, she underplays Abby so diligently that it's sometimes hard to recognise her as the same woman who acted opposite Jim Carrey with an anarchist tattoo on her breast. Though she has a few stinging lines ("Nothing that a rooftop and an AK47 won't take care of ..."), we're never allowed to lose sight of Abby's vulnerability, or what the magazine-educated Noelle calls "low self-esteem". The effect is double-edged: while it gives the love fantasy some real emotions in which to take root, it also feels a shade timid on the part of the film-makers, as if we wouldn't be inclined to cheer for a heroine who was stubbornly cranky and built of iron like Rosalind Russell or Katharine Hepburn in a Howard Hawks movie.Similarly, casting Ms Garofalo as a lady Cyrano pulls the comedy's philosophical punch, modest as it already is. Janeane Garofalo, who began her career as a stand-up, may have a name that looks like a typographical error but she also has a spiky, hacked-off comic presence that can burn her fellow performers off the screen. It's reassuring to see that an accent lightly seasoned with memories of sarf Lunnon need be no obstacle to amorous fulfilment on the West Coast.The youngish director Michael Lehmann (Heathers, Hudson Hawk, etc) handles the screenplay's shifts in tone smoothly: it's unpredictably ruminative as well as frothy, and the cast help make its most moth-eaten stuff feel newly spun.

As well she might: Brian (very likeably played by Chaplin, best known for his role in BBC2's Game On) is a more recognisable and appealing ambassador for British manhood than the effete Hugh Grant type. Noelle, a professional model, is not too swift on the uptake but she's kindly and has the kind of looks which literally cause road accidents. Brian falls for the deception - charitable viewers will need to assume that, since he is otherwise perfectly shrewd, the chap must be made deaf to the difference in the two women's voices by the racket of his unruly hormones - and from this point on, the plot is largely made up of farcical narrow squeaks, given tart edge by Abby's misery when she realises that Noelle also finds Brian rather yummy. Love enters her earphones one afternoon when Brian (Ben Chaplin), an English photographer with an urgent Great Dane problem, calls for help and is smitten by her calm intelligence and purring voice. Brian asks for a date, but Abby shies away, until his persistence pushes her to an unlikely resort: she wangles her neighbour Noelle (Uma Thurman) into adopting her identity. (The latter superlative belongs to Julia Has Two Lovers.) Other references to highbrow French Lit keep popping up throughout Audrey Wells's charming and nicely paced script, presumably by way of acknowledging her fundamental debt to Cyrano de Bergerac. Her feminine Cyrano figure is a radio vet called Abby (Janeane Garofalo), who is graceful and assured when fielding the bizarre queries of pet owners on air ("Is it OK to sedate my goldfish by putting diazepam in his bowl?"), but awkward to the point of reclusiveness in her private life, which she spends alone stroking her cat and scraping her cat-gut - she's a mean fiddler.

This must surely be the first Hollywood production in which the guy woos the girl with extracts from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, in the course of the dreamiest, if not the longest, bout of on-screen telephone sex. Viewed with a cool eye, it's a long way from flawless (the plot is at best unlikely, and there are not enough quadrupeds), but it's much better written than Moonlight and Valentino, stronger on female bonding than Now and Then and a good few frissons more seductive than Up Close and Personal. Above all, it has the courage to be a romantic comedy about people who are clever enough to read hard books. CHICK MOVIES - to use the technical genre term current among a number of distinguished female critics - have been making such a dismal showing of late that The Truth About Cats and Dogs (15) seems almost incredibly bright and funny.

This virtuoso use of the video screens was topped only when clips from GoldenEye and Mad Max III were transmitted during the apposite theme tunes, and particularly on "River Deep, Mountain High", the night's first oldie. She still looks ageless, she still wears short, spangly dresses, and she still sings her big heart out I hope she continues to do so for another few decades yet Many happy returns.. Then you double-take: genuine Sixties' footage is spliced in. Apart from Turner's taste in wigs - she currently has Dougal, the dog from The Magic Roundabout, resting on her head - not a lot has changed since those days.