AFTER This Year's Love, this year's new love for Scottish writer-director David Kane is Born Romantic, another fashionable comedy of London bohemian manners. In the words of the poster, romance isn't dead... it's just not very well, a comment that applies equally to Kane's theme and alas his smelly sock of a 'date' movie.

As with the bittersweet This Year's Love, Born Romantic takes a prickly, thorny path through metropolitan romance, charting another inter-linking batch of love's labours lost among the indecisive twenty and thirtysomethings that so fixate our film and television programme makers.

In a sitcom tale of sex and wrecks in the city, our guide through the minefield of love is a taxi driver (Adrian Lester), a doleful widower whose vehicle is as much a magnet to Kane's drifting young loves as the Salsa club in which their hopes and fears are expressed in their dance styles.

Issuing quiet advice, while masking the sadness of premature loss, Lester's cabbie mirrors the gently coercive role of Will Smith's ethereal caddie in The Legend Of Bagger Vance, playing the straight guy to all the friction and tension around him.

Scotsman Craig Ferguson plays a flash, aspiring nostalgic singer, still sharing his flat with his ex-wife in mutual inconvenience, but dreaming of being the new Bobby Darin and keen to make a move at the Salsa club on the stuck-up, distant Olivia Williams.

The club is also the haunt of the loose, livewire Jane Horrocks, who has thrown herself into all manner of short-term liaisons after being jilted at the altar by slacker David Morrissey. He in turn has newly arrived in London from the north with a late show of guilt, pinning his hopes of a re-union on a poster campaign (because he has no address for her). Meanwhile, the awkward, shy Catherine McCormack divides her time between sticking nervously to the club corner by night and tending graves by day. To her surprise, and his, she becomes the latest object of desire for hapless petty thief Jimi Mistry.

While Lester's phlegmatic cabbie drives them hither and thither, his layabout colleagues, Ian Hart and John Thomson, are a latterday Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets, wiling away the hours in cod-philosophy, mulling over sex or the lack of it.

Director Kane again has an eye for the alternative, nocturnal London; his cast enjoys itself doing Salsa moves, and his humour has grit and unpredictable twists. Unfortunately, he lacks original thoughts, instead making fast-food films, here today, forgotten tomorrow.