A Year in London review – fashion student hits it off with her professor in frothy lesbian romcom

A year is about how long this very quaint film feels, although there are moments when the soap opera silliness, the photo-love yearning and the wooden Google-translate line readings are reasonably entertaining.

Olivia (Nina Pons) is a young fashion student from southern Italy who gets the chance of a lifetime to spend a year in our glamorous capital at the “London Academy of Couture” in South Kensington. Saucer-eyed Olivia apparently can’t get over the sight of two men kissing. She is almost-engaged to a wealthy young home town boy called Paolo (Matteo Bassi), though it will soon be revealed that the cut of Paolo’s jib is not all that it might be.

Our young heroine has hardly set foot in her first lecture in London when it is clear that there is a spark between her and her sophisticated professor Nina (Melanie Liburd). They go out together to a party and have a bonding experience when they are mugged – London being, as we all know, a violent, lawless shithole – and in their separate beds that night, Nina and Olivia are smirking and squirming with their eyes closed, thinking about each other, because that is the effect a mugging in London will have.

They then go together to a fashion convention (or something) in Rome because, as Nina purrs, this will be a “great networking opportunity” for Olivia. But despite sipping flutes of champagne in Nina’s hotel room, they don’t actually get it on, because Nina has professional qualms about copping off with a student. Oh lawdy! And then that cad Paolo makes all sorts of mischief, the little rogue. But throughout it all, Nina is apparently inspired by a local outreach project for young people: “I’d love to introduce you to the kids at the community centre …” she murmurs to Olivia. Is that some sort of Anglo-Italian sexual slang?