Frances McDormand is an actress incapable of giving a bad performance. Here, she plays an unemployed middle-aged governess in pre-war London who intercepts an employment assignment and finds herself not a governess but the social secretary of a scatty actress (Amy Adams) trying to manipulate three lovers and get ahead in her career.

With these two on board, Bharat Nalluri’s film, taken from the book by Winifred Watson, ought to have been better than it is. Nalluri is trying to make a romantic comedy such as Noel Coward might have contemplated but the whole thing collapses from a basic lack of style and wit.

Adams, so good in Junebug and Enchanted, resorts to some fussy overplaying, her young men (Lee Pace, Mark Strong and Tom Payne) seem a bit amorphously glamorous and McDormand is left trying for emotional depth in a sea of middling farce and semi-sophisticated comedy.

Admittedly, the film looks nice. The period just before the war is summoned up well by Sarah Greenwood’s production design. It could also appeal to those who are fed up with swingeing special effects.

But it needs to be a good deal sharper to match the kind of Fifties movies to which it obviously aspires.