A pleasant fantasy with a perfect title, “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” is a charming* film whose few attempts at seriousness are best forgotten or ignored. When Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor are your stars, that is easy to do.

    Blunt and McGregor are gifted and attractive actors, able to play off each other with great style, and when they invest themselves in these amusing characters they bring to life the film’s very contrived* plot about bringing British angling* to the desert of the Middle East.

    Director Lasse Hallstrom and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy change the sex of a key character, a British Government press officer, from a man to a woman named Patricia Maxwell. This allowed Kristin Scott Thomas to do a sparkling* comic turn as a doctor who has fake charm.

    Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Blunt) is a British investment consultant for “a client with very substantial funds” who is passionate about the idea of bringing salmon fishing to his native Yemen. Chetwode-Talbot starts by trying to interest Alfred Jones (McGregor), one of the top British fisheries experts, in the project.

    There are mountainous parts of Yemen that salmon might enjoy visiting, and with the government pressing him to cooperate in their public relations move, Jones reluctantly admits that bringing the fish there would be theoretically* possible if someone were willing to put 50 million pounds into the project.

    Chetwode-Talbot’s client just happens to be a billionaire sheik* to whom tens of millions of pounds is pocket change. Played by Egyptian actor Amr Waked, the sheik is a man of faith who loves to fish and believes the activity can lift the spirits of his people.

    The project’s problems, however, have only just begun.(SD-Agencies)