Bridgerton-style fun as Mr Malcolm’s List proves a delight on the big screen

The truest sign that the summer’s coming to an end is that cinema is definitely looking up – this week with the hugely-enjoyable Bridgerton-style slab of silliness and scheming which comes under the title Mr Malcolm’s List.

Director Emma Holly Jones pitches it all pretty much perfectly for a couple of hours of superficiality and frivolity Regency-style as the ladies try to secure a man and the men try to make sure they get a lady worthy of them.

At the centre of it all is the arrogant Mr Malcolm of the title (very nicely played by Sope Dirisu), an Honourable gentleman with plenty of dosh on his horizon, but a chap who falls foul of the manipulative Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) when he drops her after a disastrous (for her) trip to the opera.

She hasn’t got a clue what she’s watching, and when he questions her, she hasn’t got a clue what the Corn Law is. Consequently she fails at least a couple of the tests which comprise Mr Malcolm’s List, a catalogue of ten requirements which should get him precisely the kind of woman he believes he deserves.

The priggish bounder. Small wonder Miss Thistlewaite sets about plotting her revenge, roping in her old school mate Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto). The idea is that Selina will use full knowledge of his list to woo him successfully and then she will humiliate him by producing her own list, one that he cannot possibly hope to measure up to.

The idea is to give the cad a taste of his own medicine. But two things stand in the great scheme’s way. Selina isn’t nearly as scheming as Julia needs her to be, and Mr Malcolm’s really isn’t as awful as he first appears.

Every sentence is beautifully, archly constructed; every look is knowing; but when real sentiment starts to creep in, all the artifice starts to crumble. The costumes are beautiful, the settings superb and the interplay is fun as Julia’s cunning plan sinks itself and then the social games start to turn serious.

Sope Dirisu gives a lovely performance. At first he’s seems a heartless rotter, but is his list actually his shield? His mother seems to think so. He’s just so staggeringly eligible that he really does need something to protect himself with in the face of all the women just chucking themselves at him. Poor, poor chap.

And Zawe Ashton is similarly impressive as Julia, a woman with so great a fear of being left on the shelf and so super-sensitive a slight-ometer that she can’t see the obvious love staring her in the face.

But really it’s Freida Pinto’s film as Selina Dalton, the friend summoned up from Sussex to do the dirty but far too decent in the end to do it. The colourblind casting is something plenty of other films have prepared us for recently – and the skill of the cast makes sure that it works across an amusing couple of hours which probably aren’t going to linger long in the memory, but at least are played with wit and a mischievous and appealing sense of fun.