ALL FOR LOVE
THE ROMCOM IS BACK. HERE’S WHY UNDERESTIMATING THIS BELOVED GENRE IS A BIG MISTAKE... HUGE
The romcom revival.
I’VE BEEN FANTASISING about my soulmate for as long as I can remember. He‘s taken many forms in my imagination over the years: a sworn enemy who’s suddenly drawn to me or someone who has been trying to track me down ever since we met more than a decade ago. And, sure, he’s totally unreal, but he must also sound pretty familiar, right? Because, like me, you were probably raised on a steady diet of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks meet-cutes and the prospect of impossible yet impossibly charming cinematic love.
Romcoms have been a Hollywood mainstay since the early days. Simply put, they are the best, even though, sometimes, they are actually the worst for setting up unrealistic expectations about relationships, reinforcing stereotypes — the list goes on. They’re mindlessly predictable yet endlessly soothing — like the comfort that comes over you after a bite of Nanna’s cookies.
Despite all that love, though, this genre hasn’t had its due. (The last romantic comedy to win a Best Picture Oscar was Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in 1978.) Since then, the romcom has been relegated to “chick flick” territory, a place most men never deign to enter or take seriously, despite ticket sales. What’s more, after a romcom-filled ’90s and early aughts, the genre seemed to fade into the background of a Marvel- and think-piece-dominated decade. But all that shifted last year. Crazy Rich Asians was a critical and box-office success. Netflix also single-handedly revived the teen romcom (To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Sierra Burgess Is A Loser) and the so-bad-it’s-good Christmas romcom (The Princess Switch, A Christmas Prince). To top it all off, Ariana Grande’s video for “Thank U, Next” paid homage to classics including Legally Blonde and 13 Going On 30.
So, why the sudden flurry of the warm fuzzies? “When the economic and political worlds become dire, we look to escapist fantasies,” says Francey Russell, a philosophy professor and film critic. You’d have to look no further than your Twitter feed to confirm Russell’s theory — we need joy more than ever right now.
Uk-based director Elizabeth Sankey explores the impact these flicks have on our perception of love and relationships in her documentary Romantic Comedy. “[Despite how problematic romcoms can be], they are amazing for making people see the humanity in characters because the romcom is one of the only genres that’s simply about relationships,” she says.
The key is to recognise the issues and for filmmakers to address them. “The format of romantic comedies is incredibly powerful and still works — we just need to be putting different kinds of relationships in these stories,” says Sankey. This year promises to do just that, with films such as Isn’t It Romantic, which stars Rebel Wilson as a cynic, who, after years of being told she wasn’t worthy of romance, finds herself trapped inside a romcom, and What Men Want, starring Taraji P. Henson, which flips the gender script of the 2000 original. “The fact that there’s this [rise] in romcoms that are reinventing the genre but also being unapologetic about being romcoms suggests that there’s a new interest in earnestness and love in movies,” says Russell.
So maybe the future of romcoms lies in their duality — their strange ability to make us root for love while also broadening the scope of who that love can happen to. “The way we feel about You’ve Got Mail we could feel about a trans woman falling in love with a man — and that could be something that changes the world,” says Sankey. I know I’ll be watching.