I’m a sucker for a rom-com
‘Weddings. Funerals. A surprise baby… I’m a middle-aged northern man who always cries at a romantic comedy’
Robert Crampton
Saturday February 25 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Times
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Ihave, admittedly, a very low bar when it comes to enjoying a romantic comedy. I’m the guy who loved Killers (2010; Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl) even though the consensus is it’s pants, a verdict reflected by its rating of just ten per cent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. On the other hand, while lots of people liked Chalet Girl (2011; Felicity Jones’s breakthrough), as evidenced by its score of 77 per cent, not many consider it a seminal moment in motion picture history, as I do. Bottom line: I’m a sucker for a rom-com.
Even given that caveat, however, I reckon What’s Love Got to Do with It?, which opened in cinemas yesterday but which I was lucky enough to catch at a press preview the previous week, is pretty special. Shazad Latif is extraordinarily handsome and Lily James is one of those performers you’d watch reading the phone book, if we still had phone books.
I went on my own, which is just as well, because I managed to get lost between Bond Street Tube station and Selfridges, which isn’t easy. When seeking out a new destination, I encourage my family to refer to me as the Human Compass, and the Human Compass got his bearings badly wrong in the backstreets of Marylebone. I’d never have lived it down. Huffing and puffing, I made it just in time into Working Title HQ. A dozen film critics half my age surveyed the sweating relic with a mixture of condescension and pity.
What’s Love Got to Do with It? is not ROFL funny, but then I contend rom-coms aren’t meant to be hilarious, not primarily; the rom ultimately should be more important than the com, otherwise you might as well be watching Airplane! for the eighth time. Wry and rueful is sufficient. Plus, you need some witty zeitgeisty observations, fun costumes and knockout interiors too, all of which What’s Love, as we insiders like to abbreviate it, delivers.
Although a killer line or two in a rom-com is always welcome of course. As in The Devil Wears Prada when Miranda, the monstrous Meryl Streep character, tells super-slim Anne Hathaway, “I thought you would be different. I said to myself, go ahead. Take a chance. Hire the smart, fat girl.” Or when Emily Blunt asks Hathaway’s fashion ingenue, “Oh, I’m sorry, do you have some prior commitment? Some hideous skirt convention you have to go to?”
I can’t recall anything that classy in Jemima Khan’s script for What’s Love, but it’s not half bad. Two hipster documentary producers are neatly satirised. When Lily James wants to make a documentary about honour killings, these two clowns aren’t keen on her serious approach to the subject, yet reluctantly concede an upbeat “feelgood take on honour killings” isn’t really a goer. I giggled at that and so did half the audience at my screening. Latif saying they’d have to leave early for their flight to Lahore to allow time “so I can be randomly searched” went down well too.
Mind you, as with the rom-com genre in general (and action films, period dramas, thrillers, capers, whodunnits, biopics, sports movies, sagas and kids’ films), I also maintain a very low bar to being amused. As someone who presumes to write in a comic fashion myself, I feel enormous solidarity with others who do so as well. We can’t all be Richard Curtis.
Often, I’ll be that one guy in the cinema – or the sitting room – laughing uncontrollably at something on screen that leaves everyone else unmoved. I could never have been a critic. My analysis usually extends as far as, “Oh, well done! Good for you!” Like when Hugh Bonneville is patronising Julia Roberts in Notting Hill.
Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman go into a bar. Barman says, “Is this some sort of f***ing joke?” I was helpless the first time I heard that one. See what I mean?
Lily James, in true Friends tradition, lives in a property her character could not possibly afford in real life. In her case it’s a magnificently roomy houseboat moored on the Thames in London. Wood-burning stove, book-lined shelves, shabby chic furniture, vintage film posters, the works. The fantastical element of most rom-coms is not the plot; it’s the implied price per square foot of accommodation in the world’s great cities.
One of my other low bars is the one that must be reached to make me cry. It doesn’t take much to bring a tear to my eye. Kids or animals in distress. Landscapes. Weddings. Funerals. Historic events at which good triumphed over evil. Watching those Remembrance Day events where the little girl thinks her daddy is serving overseas but then he pops up in person at the Albert Hall, I’m in floods.
I thought What’s Love was going to let me down in this respect but no, near the end, a surprise baby had me dabbing away with my sleeve. Shortly afterwards there duly arrived the biggest reason I adore these types of films.
A happy ending.
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