Now this is the way a romantic comedy should be made.

Redeeming the genre from last week's dismal While You Were Sleeping, Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline manage to deliver hilarious and surprisingly touching performances in French Kiss. Ryan plays Kate, a seriously neurotic woman who takes the phrase "obsessive-compulsive" to new lows. Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is Kate's fiancee, an up-and-coming doctor who, when Kate is too afraid to board the airplane, takes a week-long business trip to Paris alone.

And there the games begin. Charlie unexpectedly falls for a French "goddess" and calls off his relationship with Kate. Stunned, our heroine becomes understandably obsessed with getting Charlie back, and the games begin. On her white-knuckled flight across the Atlantic, she encounters Luc (Kevin Kline), a smarmy French con-man trying to go straight. The two couldn't be less alike, but an unlikely romance begins to sprout.

French Kiss actually manages to make a decent statement about love and happiness, bringing to light the truth of the old adage, "There is no substitute for experience." The film is also believable despite its outlandish main characters, whom Ryan and Kline portray with wonderful emotion and with an amazing flair for comic timing. Kline's antics are simply hilarious to the point of absurdity.

The film's ending is pretty obvious, but how they get there is full of surprises, and it also made me remember: Love really can come from the unlikeliest of places.