The enduring appeal of the rom-com movie
I’m a big movie fan and an incurable romantic so I enjoy a good romantic comedy and this weekend I attended a course on the history of rom-coms held at the City Literary Institute in London. The lecturer was male (Guy Meredith) but, except for me, all the eight students were female.
Our lecturer told us that all stories have four basic elements: world, characters, tone, and plot. All rom-coms have essentially the same plot: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back (or, of course, a reversal of these gender roles). So, to make a rom-com different, the writer and director need to manipulate the other three story elements: world, character, tone.
At the opening of the course, each of us was invited to name our favourite rom-com and a recent one that we have seen. I offered “When Harry Met Sally …” [my review here] and “The Meddler” [my review here] respectively.
During the one-day course, we were shown clips from 11 films – not all of which I would regard as rom-coms: “The General”, “It Happened One Night”, “Once” [my review here], “About A Boy” [my review here], “The Third Man”, “Tootsie”, “Fever Pitch” [my review here], “Knocked Up” [my review here], “Music & Lyrics” [my review here], one segment of “Paris Je T’aime”, and “Sideways” [my review here].
Which is your favourite rom-com?