So Kat Ellis (Debra Messing) calls an escort service and hires Nick (Dermot Mulroney). She's desperate for "The Wedding Date."

That's the hook for this modestly amusing, efficiently made romantic comedy. And since the setting is a wedding in England and the central plot involves falling in love with a sex-for-hire individual, you'd be excused for assuming this is "Four Weddings and a Funeral" meets "Pretty Woman." Let's call it "One Wedding and a Handsome Guy."

Although the trappings are familiar, writer Dana Fox has contributed a lean but clever script and director Clare Kilner keeps things efficiently on the move. It helps that Messing and Mulroney generate the sort of mysterious screen chemistry that makes such movies comfortable.

Messing is appropriately frazzled, yet she seems clearly the most balanced and sane in her unstable family. The Ellises are from England, where their younger daughter (Amy Adams) is about to be married in a country church in Surrey.

The film takes off immediately as Kat boards the plane for England, and has her prearranged meeting in first class with her paid escort. Once in London — and then Surrey — the self-assured Nick calms Kat and guides her through her ordeal, from helping her pick the right rehearsal-dinner dress to boosting her rock-bottom self-esteem.

(In a switch from the "Pretty Woman" formula, it's not the hooker who gets the Pygmalion makeover, it's the person who hires the hooker.)

Clearly, we're expecting Kat and Nick to move beyond a financial arrangement to an affair of the heart, but the machinations that lead to it aren't quite as predictable. At any rate, humor and romance are both served up for women filmgoers. If this season has a film for which the term "chick flick" was created, it's "The Wedding Date."

Forgive this sexist suggestion, but perhaps the film's opening is timed to provide alternate activity for the many wives and girlfriends who'll be abandoned for a day on Super Bowl Sunday. You may not be ready to hire a guy to pay attention to you, but you might want to watch another woman who does.