Romantic Comedy (Sankey, 2019)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Elizabeth Sankey and I are in agreement on the greatest romantic comedy of all time – When Harry Met Sally. It’s a film that hits all the important touchstones of the rom-com, with its swooning, heartfelt romance and its inviting sense of cosiness. When Harry Met Sally is the best of the lot not just because it meets these touchstones, though, but because it transcends them. All the usual criticisms of the subgenre fall away when watching When Harry Met Sally. They cease to matter. There’s something incontrovertibly universal in the film’s willingness to play into archetypes (the surly nihilist falling for the resolute optimist, the race to find each other at the end, the friends who don’t realise their feelings for each other, and so on), and then exceed them, setting the bar so high it’s unlikely we’ll get another film that eclipses it.  My complicated feelings toward romantic comedies are of a different nature to Sankey’s, but rooted in the same symptoms. For me, the natural inclination I felt toward the outright emotion of these films felt off limits – these were ‘women’s pictures’, after all. I masked my love for them with a general disdain, instead. For Sankey, a lifetime of watching romantic comedies led to a warping of expectations and of her appreciation of herself. Both stem not necessarily from the films themselves, but from the way society influences what goes into these movies and what it in turn takes away from them. 

Sankey narrates this fleet documentary treatise over imagery from a range of romantic comedies stretching from the beginning of cinema all the way into the modern day. Her voice is mixed in with the contributions of other critics, academics and film professionals, reckoning with the political undercurrents of this subgenre so often associated with the idea of switching your brain off and relaxing. As with all art, there is messaging within these films even when they take pains to assure you there isn’t. The arc of Romantic Comedy functions cleverly as a kind of parallel to the typical love story one might expect from a rom-com. To begin, we learn about the toxic obsession Sankey had with rom-coms from a young age, how they convinced her of a fantastical idea of relationships, invited her to overlook red flag behaviour from men, and corrupted her sense of body image. As the film progresses, however, she begins to reclaim their importance in other ways, and ‘befriends’ the rom-com. By the end of the film, with an understanding of how romantic comedies can proceed forward in a more progressive way, she has recaptured her love for them. It’s a clever device, allowing Sankey to attempt to break down and then reassemble the parts of the rom-com. What is excess and can be discarded? What is it that we are seeking in these types of films?

This inquisition is ultimately only partly successful, falling prey to some of the same issues that befell a similar but far less successful film, Nina Menkes’ Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. That film, which proposed a similar feminist reckoning, there taking on the entire state of cinema, was marred by the Menkes’ choice to dredge up clips that supported her arguments from films and presented them void of their context. The same action is taken from time to time in Romantic Comedy, particularly in the early sections of the film, where Sankey reinforces her argument with a wide range of clips, draining the source of any context but the one Sankey forces upon it. In a segment discussing the impact of rom-coms on the general societal standards set upon women’s bodies – an entirely worthy subject of critique – the film accompanies clips of obvious culprit Bridget Jones’s Diary with scenes of bulimia in Leslye Headland’s acidic, gleefully subversive Bachelorette, despite the fact that the film itself is critiquing the same things Romantic Comedy is. In another sequence, Sankey delves into the way rom-coms often push certain ideals of how women can be palatable to men by having the main characters enjoy ‘manly’ activities like beer-drinking and baseball (think Miss Congeniality, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, and so on). Again, a worthy subject, but Sankey’s choice of clips does her no favours. Particularly egregious is the segment dedicated to the infamous ‘You’re Too Big’ musical number, which misrepresents the sequence as an encouragement to women to behave ‘sluttily’, despite the fact that the film is a send-up of the very same thing. It’s representative of a broader issue in Romantic Comedy’s thesis, which itself can trend toward the essentialism of second-wave feminism, and occasionally teeters dangerously close to slut-shaming.

Far better are the sequences later in the film, particularly the ones that explore the magic of When Harry Met Sally, and present a case for the rom-com as an essential genre in spite of its marked flaws. Throughout, Sankey allows musical sequences of her own to interject, constructing montages using her own songs drawn from her work with the band Summer Camp. This allows for a feeling of homemade authenticity to shine through, the idea of the film’s assembled clips forming a patchwork mosaic like the kind we can imagine used to run through Sankey’s mind as a child. A late-breaking, extensive montage of climactic rom-com kisses is resolutely joyous, drilling into the essential power of this subgenre. It’s part of a messy but deeply-felt personal opus, one that encourages us to think broadly about a type of film, dismissed because of its adjacency to the experiences of women for far too long – a pure expression of Sankey’s feelings that may in turn validate the feelings of those who share her love of these kinds of films.

Romantic Comedy premieres Thursday 14 March, 8:30pm on Rialto Channel and is part of ‘Voice Of Women Through Film’ – every Thursday night at 8:30pm throughout March. 

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