The Roses review: Colman and Cumberbatch are at their very British best in this fizzy comedy ★★★★

Ivy’s list scrapes the barrel early on with “the fact that he has arms” and ends in a gratuitous deployment of the C-word. This results in the couple’s mutual hate being replaced by an outbreak of shared laughter, therefore establishing the cultural disconnect between the film’s British lead characters and the often earnest Americans in their lives.

Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara stays faithful to Chekhov’s rule, that a gun introduced in the first act should be fired in the third. After the counselling scene his plot is mostly told in flashback; the couple meet in the kitchen of a London restaurant, where Ivy is making salmon carpaccio when in bursts Theo, who can’t bear the company of his smug colleagues as they congratulate themselves on another soulless building. Ivy consoles the stranger by giving him a taste of her salmon and fiery banter, and soon the two are living the dream on the Californian coast (the movie was filmed on location in Devon) with two children.

This idyll crashes when Theo’s visionary design of a maritime museum gets destroyed by a storm when the building’s silly sail on the roof catches too much wind. His career and reputation are wrecked. Simultaneously, Ivy’s little fish eatery – boldly called We’ve Got Crabs – becomes a raging success when a food critic takes shelter from the storm and has dinner there. Crestfallen Theo throws himself into parenthood, while Ivy grows her success into an empire. What male ego could survive that?

My only gripe with the movie is that Theo’s design is so obviously awful it would never be built. However Cumberbatch and Colman are so likable and brimful of British common sense that their descent into barbarity is all the more thrilling.