In a perfect world...they never would have met. <BR>&nbsp;

In a perfect world...they never would have met.

Harrison Ford plays a Washington cop, Dutch Van Den Broek, he`s a sargeant in the internal affairs division. One morning he says goodbye to his wife, she`s going to Miami on business, and that`s the end of his safe, comfortable life . Because the plane in which she`s travelling crashes and there are no survivors. Numbed by his loss he discovers some incongruities in his wife`s death. She wasn`t actually going to Miami on business, she was travelling as the wife of the man sitting next to her on the plane and they had identical keys on them. The man was the husband of prominent New Hampshire congresswoman Kay Chandler - (Kristen Scott Thomas). These two people from different worlds suddenly find they have much in common... Sydney Pollack was the director of Random Hearts, working on a screenplay by Kurt Luedtke who wrote Out of Africa for him. It`s a supremely well-crafted film that you actually want to believe in more than you actually can. It has so many interesting elements. Dutch is a man who`s expertise is in being able to tell when people are lying and he didn`t recognise a lie close- up. He`s obsessed about going back to the last thing he knows was true in his life. It`s understandable that his obsession encompasses the one person who shares that lie. Perhaps the casting of the extremely beautiful but rather cold Kristen Scott Thomas with the emotionally inaccessible Harrison Ford was a bit optimistic when you`re trying to make an audience believe in a passionate affair. And the subplot of Dutch`s investigation of a corrupt cop is convenient for the plot but an irritating distraction. This film looks so good - Philippe Rousselot`s cinematography, Barbara Ling`s design - it`s a pity it doesn`t ever make you think you`re watching something significant like Peter Weir did with Fearless, another film about a plane disaster.