Possibly the most damning critique I heard this year was someone saying that Rye Lane, the Peckham-set romantic-comedy film from this year ‘was like a Nationwide advert.’ Damning because it was deeply specific about the sort of cinematography the film shared with its commercial cousin, but also because it helped me understand so much of what is missing in the current post-streaming romcom renaissance we are having of late.
Yesterday, I wrote about Barbie and decided not to mention being deeply alienated listening to the Sentimental Garbage episode about it, because I enjoy that podcast and as a project, I think it broadly manages to avoid suggesting ‘girl things rule, boy things drool’ for the sake of. It’s mainly not reductive about these things, and seeks to interrogate, analyse and cherish traditionally feminine pursuits or artworks in a curious and rigorous way and I am mature enough to admit that I was bringing my own doll-shaped baggage to my listening. This week, Caroline O’Donoghue’s guest was novelist and screenwriter, Monica Heisey, and together they spent two hours on the various plotlines of Love Actually. I had a wonderful time in their company, listening to them talk about a film I haven’t seen in years, and I had basically thought had been Gawker-scorned to death by 2016. Ultimately, though, there was two hours’ worth of thinking, chatting and joking to be had from the source material: while I don’t think Richard Curtis is a particularly innovative director, watching Four Weddings and Notting Hill just before the pandemic demonstrated that he is, actually (ha) a skilled screenwriter.
This isn’t a new or bold insight. Richard Curtis, the Vicar of Dibley and Blackadder man, can write? Who would have guessed. There was a very good reason his 90s Hugh Grant vehicles were such big hits, beyond the charms of the lead himself, and the fact Britain was providing a confident, if somewhat bashful, vision of itself to the world as an export. Basically, these films are rich texts. In Four Weddings, you are immersed into a cast of fopsy-bopsy-wopsy friends who, even if they are very different from the general audience’s world, are depicted in an incredibly real way, as a network of people, some of whom are really close, some of whom opposite ends of the circle. It’s really difficult to pull that off and while writing this, I suddenly thought about the first two series of Skins as an example of something that also possesses it. Hanging the plot on a series of five milestones might be a cheat, or else it’s a very sensible way of providing architecture and depth of emotion for people living otherwise ordinary-ish lives: they have money, but they’re not powerful in the sense of being politicians or criminal leaders or anything like that.
In Notting Hill, the passing of time is established through the Ain’t No Sunshine-scored scene, where Hugh Grant’s character walks down Portabello Road as the seasons pass him by; the external world is very much present and affecting him (pulling his coat tighter as winter calls, and necessitating costume changes), but he is alone in a bustling place. He misses her.
So the reason I am wary about the ‘I love love’ thing is that it feels like it’s become a thought-terminating slogan whenever contemporary romance narratives, in film, tv or fiction, are pulled up for being a bit shallow. Is it not enough to just have two people meet, establish a connection, find and eventually defeat the obstacles in their way? Well yes, but also: no. Because the thing about finding love, or falling in love or whatever is that it is miraculous for sitting alongside the need to do laundry, hold down a job, navigate one’s family, swallow resentments about one’s participation in other people’s weddings and so on. What if you meet someone, and then your best friend tries to kill themselves? Or, as in Love Actually, caring responsibilities are your roadblock to falling for someone. We laugh about the awfulness of Andie’s friends in The Devil Wears Prada but at least they existed, and, as in Bridget Jones, particularly in the novel version, they have distinct personalities that form the basis of b- and c-plots.
I don’t know how the British film industry is doing at the moment, and it’s impressive that a romantic film with two Black British leads got made at all, but the fact the pair at the heart of Rye Lane meet and experience so much in one day is both its selling point and its weakness in terms of establishing a depth of world and character beyond the boy who has just met girl. It’s not trying to be an expansive film, and at 82 minutes, it shares a similar runtime to Finnish romantic dark comedy Fallen Leaves. The latter has a more experienced filmmaking team behind it and it is a good debut, but it does serve as a bit of a riposte to the idea that we only need 90 minutes for a simple story to be told well. Maybe my bar is higher than some of the reviewers, like Mark Kermode, in my response to the film, because I am eager for a true classic of the genre which is set in Britain and neither of the leads are white. No offence to the wonderful tv series, Lovesick — it’s just that interracial relationships as used as a shortcut for indicating progression and harmony that actually further underscores the extent to which whiteness simply must be present for a story, or ad campaign, to be successful, or at least, less likely to be branded ‘risky.’
While I think Four Weddings is the better film except for Julia Roberts being the stronger actor of the two female romantic roles, both it and Notting Hill are about 2 hours long. Bridget Jones lasts 96 minutes, I have just learned, so it’s not purely a case of longer being better, but rather that I think we have lost confidence in the value of non-expositional dialogue or scenes. Reading a recent work of commercial romance writing, geared towards a millennial audience and centring a queer woman friends-to-lovers plot also demonstrated that this shallower lens is not restricted to film alone. I don’t want to pick out sentences from it because that feels mean, somehow, and I suspect it speaks to how overworked and underpaid editorial staff are in publishing nowadays, but nevertheless: I think we can expect a bit more. And I’m sure the team behind Rye Lane will be able to provide even more for the next project(s) the work on.
[As of this weekend, the script of Rye Lane is available in the BBC Writers Script Library, which is one of those resources I always flag but have yet to take advantage of. Maybe over the holidays.]