Actually, it is about Christmas
It’s not festive without certain music and films. Greg Bruce explains.
The problem with Christmas films is that they seem to feel obliged to embody the spirit of Christmas as it’s generally forced upon us, which is not really representative of the spirit as generally lived.
Christmas is a time to come together with people we haven’t spoken to all year, mostly because we’ve been avoiding them, and to celebrate the opportunity to circle the Sylvia Park carpark like desperate magpies, and now get to do that both on the days before Christmas and the days after, because we were stupid enough to invent Boxing Day sales.
But, unless you’re a hateful, spiteful cynic, and I’m not begrudging you that right, you also love Christmas for its traditions, its nostalgia, the joy in your children’s eyes, the chance to hug people you hardly speak to, and to put aside the fact that they borrowed your car for two days in August and didn’t put in any gas.
The content of most Christmas movies is indisputably bad, but even so, it’s hard to look at a list of movies as I have done this week and not tear up at the way they take you back to certain times in your life, when you were falling in love, or at least desperate to.
Is there a movie in popular culture that does that better than Love Actually? It’s the cleverest Christmas movie ever made, in the same way The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York is the cleverest Christmas song ever made, because it is not about Christmas at all, but about our deepest feelings, and about the exploitation of those feelings.
It’s funny to read the first reviews of Love Actually now, 14 years after its release, and see how they were almost perfectly divided, even among “serious” reviewers, between hatred and delight, with almost no middle ground. It is the perfect Christmas movie because, exactly like Christmas itself, the way it makes you feel tells you almost everything you need to know about who you are.
The movie’s masterful opening, at Heathrow Airport, watching loved ones reunite while Hugh Grant’s voiceover goes on about the joy of airport reunions, is utterly moving scenesetting, and only tangentially about Christmas.
The film is absurd and the stories saccharine, and there are serious problems with the portrayal of women, and that is an issue that should not be pushed comfortably aside, but if you can’t have a good cry about Colin Firth speaking broken Portuguese, which he’s taught himself in just a couple of scenes, to propose to his housekeeper in front of a restaurant full of Portuguese speakers. And if you can’t cry at her replying in broken English, which she’s taught herself behind the scenes, then you have a fundamental joy deficiency.
“You learned English?” he asks just before they kiss.
“Just in cases,” she replies.
What does that exchange have to do with Christmas? More and more with every passing year.