ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE?

According to critics, they’re toxic, un-feminist and exclusive. So why are romantic comedies more popular than ever?

Over the years, romantic comedies have attracted more criticism than most other genres. According to critics, they’re toxic, anti-feminist and exclusive. But now, thanks to a spate of new films, a documentary and even a festival, they’ve never been more popular. By Hannah-Rose Yee.

IF THE GOLDEN age of romantic comedies had a face, it would belong to Julia Roberts. It would be Julia Roberts’s tangle of auburn curls and megawatt smile breaking into a contagious laugh in Pretty Woman.

No, wait. If romantic comedies had a face, it would be Meg Ryan tipping back her head at a Katz’s Deli table and faking an orgasm over a turkey sandwich. Actually, no, it’s Andie MacDowell in an enormous hat as the glamorous, enigmatic guest at a wedding or four (and a funeral).

Until recently, if the bulk of romantic comedies had a face it would be a white one. It would be the face of a cisgender, Caucasian, able-bodied, heterosexual, slim, conventionally attractive woman. It would be the face of Roberts or Ryan or MacDowell, of Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon or Drew Barrymore or Kate Hudson. And they’d be falling in love with the face of Hugh Grant, Richard Gere, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler, Ryan Reynolds or Matthew McConaughey.

“I love films with Meg Ryan and Reese Witherspoon, but they’ve lived a very different life to women like me,” romantic-comedy fan Miranda Tapsell tells Vogue. It’s part of the reason why the actor co-wrote and starred in Top End Wedding, a raucous, big-hearted film about family, culture and connection that earned $1 million at the box office in its first weekend earlier this year. And it’s just one of a new wave of films reshaping the genre from the perspective of those most often excluded from it.

The lack of diversity is one of the biggest problems with romantic comedies, and one of the reasons the oncepopular genre fell out of favour in the last decade. Some 30 years ago, when Ryan and Billy Crystal traded one-liners in Nora Ephron’s electric When Harry Met Sally, the romantic comedy was at its zenith. Ryan and Roberts dominated the genre with films like Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, Pretty Woman and Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill.

Successful though those movies were, they were all blindingly exclusive and heteronormative. What’s more, romantic comedies leaned heavily on a Filofax of tropes that romanticised potentially dangerous behaviour. Stalking? You’ll find that in Love Actually, Sleepless in Seattle and While You Were Sleeping. Deception? It’s the bedrock upon which How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is built. And My Best Friend’s Wedding we’ll leave in a deranged class all of its own.

By the mid-00s, after a string of increasingly convoluted romantic comedies like Bride Wars and Failure to Launch highlighted the worst of the genre, the writing was on the wall. Romantic comedies are toxic, corny, anti-feminist and downright bad, critics said.

And yet, beginning in 2018, the genre had something of a resurgence. It started on Netflix. First came a little rom com called Set It Up, which fizzed its way through a beenthere-done-that storyline on the basis of the chemistry of its stars alone. Then there was the Oscar-nominated The Big Sick, based on comedian Kumail Nanjiani’s real-life romance with wife Emily V Gordon. Along came Crazy Rich Asians, which layered Prince Charming fantasy upon Prince Charming fantasy like a pandan chiffon cake.

This year has been a vintage one for romantic comedies. We have watched everything from a charming send-up (Rebel Wilson’s Isn’t It Romantic) to an ode to female friendship ( Someone Great) and a classic opposites-attract flick ( Long Shot). There was Tapsell’s Top End Wedding. There was Ali Wong’s Always Be My Maybe, a romantic comedy in which Keanu Reeves stars as himself, which is all you need to know. In November there’ll be Last Christmas, starring Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding in the first initial blushes of attraction, and Netflix will stream the sequel to the swoony To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before just before Valentine’s Day. Actors who might have avoided the genre in the past are lining up to put their name to one: Kristen Stewart is currently working on a queer Christmas rom com.

“Doesn’t that sound like everything you could possibly want in a romantic comedy?” says Elizabeth Sankey, director of the critical documentary Romantic Comedy, which just premiered at the Sydney Underground Film Festival. Romantic Comedy begins with Sankey rewatching Runaway Bride in the blissful weeks after her own, muchlonged-for wedding, and it was the moment when her rom com-saturated world came “crashing down”. “I was like: ‘Hang on a sec, this woman clearly has a problem with marriage,’” Sankey recalls. “No-one around her said you don’t have to get married. The narrative was pushing her towards the church: it was really unsettling.” Sankey adds: “I still really love that movie, though.”

Sankey’s documentary strives to answer this very question: why do we still love romantic comedies, even when we know they’re flawed?

The director believes that it is partly down to the vicious cycle of internalised misogyny. Romantic comedies tell female stories, often directed by female filmmakers like Ephron and Nancy Meyers ( The Holiday), that the traditionally masculine cadre of critics hasn’t always related to. This begets bad reviews, which in turn begets a bad reputation, which in turn begets a sense of guilt when watching a romantic comedy. “Women feel like they have a responsibility to agree with the idea that romantic comedies are trash,” Sankey explains. “But maybe they’re as much of a trash thing as Marvel or James Bond, but men don’t feel the need to say that the stuff they like is trash.”

Romantic comedy is, after all, the genre in which female characters and all their ambitions are put centre stage. Sure, there are varieties of cheese to be found in most of them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all rom coms are un-feminist. Take Roberts’s Vivian in Pretty Woman, for example: feminist author Roxane Gay has spoken about the strength and agency to be found in her character. “Consent is a real part of this movie,” Gay has said. “I think the way she acts is pretty feminist, especially for the time.”

The truth of the thing, though, is that we still want to watch romantic comedies because we want to believe in human connection. These are movies about falling in love, a big kind of love courtesy of meet-cutes and grand gestures, which is exactly what Margaret Pomeranz, film expert and co-host of Screen on Foxtel Arts, thinks is missing from real life. “Talking to young people today, I’m aware of how social media, instead of making connections between people, has in fact driven people apart,” she explains. “I think the youth of today are hankering for the belief in true romance, and romantic comedies offer them that belief.”

Sankey agrees: “No matter how bad they are, they are constructed in a way that is so satisfying. The arc gives you this feeling of elation and hope.” And so does Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who recently mused on a podcast that the success of her hit television series was down to the fact that “people wanted to see a story about love … [about] the attempt to connect, the attempt to love”.

Creators working in the genre now know they can’t wade in the same shallow pool as their predecessors. Back in the golden age of romantic comedy, Jennifer Lopez was one of only a few women of colour to have mainstream success in the genre. Now, the best romantic comedies of 2019 have diverse leads. Just look at Yesterday, the new Beatles-themed musical romance from Richard Curtis, Mr Notting Hill himself. It starred Lily James and British Indian actor Himesh Patel as two best friends learning that yes, all you really need is love. Or Top End Wedding, which featured Tapsell falling in love with Welsh actor Gwilym Lee against the sunburnt backdrop of Darwin.

“I love making a night of watching rom coms with face masks and chocolate and wine. I am unashamedly that girl,” Tapsell says. “But I know that because the women in this genre don’t look like me and haven’t walked in my shoes, I’m left to fill the gap.”

Today’s rom coms are also devoted to telling queer stories, thanks to Stewart and The Lion King’s Billy Eichner, who is currently working on a gay romantic comedy with producer Judd Apatow. They have size diversity, too, with Wilson’s Isn’t It Romantic following in the footsteps of trailblazers Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique in giving plussize women their chance to feel loved and, crucially, deserving of love on-screen. And the latest crop of romantic comedies tells the stories of characters who aren’t hurtling towards the altar in their 20s. Take 2018’s Ibiza as an example, a movie where the starcrossed lovers, played by Richard Madden and Gillian Jacobs, end the film – spoiler alert – not together per se, but wondering what together might even look like.

The point is that the genre has never been as inclusive as it is right now. It’s why Miraya Berke created the inaugural Rom Com Fest in July. Staged in Los Angeles, the festival was the first to focus on the genre and proved so successful that a follow-up is scheduled for 2020. “The world is a scary place right now, and I think we all need something happy and uplifting to enjoy,” Berke says. “Films celebrating love and relationships, not more violence, is what we need more of.”

This is the genre, after all, that told us that we should meet a stranger at the top of the Empire State Building. This is the genre that made us think that rebounding with a lovely single father who looks like Jude Law and can cry on demand was not only possible, but plausible. This genre trades in surreal; its brand is magic.

That’s why it feels so good to watch a romantic comedy – because they’re about hope, connection and ebullient meet-cutes. They’re about loving the way someone orders a sandwich, about rescuing your knight in shining armour right back, about girls standing in front of boys. They’re about the stuff of life: the extraordinary things that happen to ordinary people every single day. They’re about love in all of its up-at-dawn, golden-syrupy, casual and exquisite forms.

It’s a mistake to think, though, that for all of their surrealism and magic, romantic comedies are fantasies. Because they’re not. Put them under a microscope and you’ll see that even at their most crazed – when short-term memory loss means that a couple has to restage their first date some 50 times, say – they’re actually not about how nonsensical it can be to fall in love. They’re about believing in the possibility of falling in love in the first place.

“The world is a scary place and I think we all need something happy and uplifting to enjoy”