Book Club: The Next Chapter review — This giddy, sun-kissed caper is so saccharine it should come with a health warning

Fiercely independent singleton Vivian (Fonda) has finally decided to get hitched, to ageing charmer Arthur (Don Johnson), so her friends Diane (Keaton), Sharon (Bergen) and Carol (Steenburgen) take her on a bachelorette trip to Italy to celebrate.

Once there, the girls behave like typical Americans, flashing the cash in over-priced restaurants, getting their bags stolen, shouting at waiters in English.

But there’s romance in the air too, as Carol bumps into an old flame who now runs his own restaurant, and Sharon is wooed by a retired philosophy professor who just happens to be knocking around (the streets of Venice are probably crawling with them).

Sharon, a retired judge, also has frequent run-ins with a grumpy policeman (Giancarlo Giannini), who might not be quite as unpleasant as he seems.

Rome, Venice and the backroads of Tuscany all have cameos in a giddy, sun-kissed caper so saccharine it should come with a health warning for diabetics.

The jokes are laboured, Italians are depicted as light-fingered romantics, and Bergen bravely undertakes the grim task of delivering a string of sexually-themed double-entendres.

It ought to be unspeakable, and yet somehow, due perhaps to a lamentable want in my character, I found myself almost enjoying it, in particular the knowingly ditsy performance of Diane Keaton, the finest comic actress of her generation.

There is, too, something genuinely pleasing about watching a group of older women pointedly refusing to behave like grannies.

Carpe diem is this group’s philosophy, and though they are supposed to have bonded over books in the first place, there’s not a lot of reading going on.

Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage gets a few mentions, including some fortune-cookie quotes, but we never see any of them reading it, so perhaps they were spared that torture.

Sixties lionesses Candice Bergen and Jane Fonda have embraced old age in sharply contrasting styles, but Fonda is a good sport about her various cosmetic procedures, and seems quite prepared to make fun of them.

In fact, all four women appear to be having a blast together, so that some scenes feel like an interruption of an actual holiday.

This film is oddly watchable, and only because of them.

Two stars