This article examines the lasting impact of the rom-com 'Love Actually' 20 years after its release. While acknowledging its ability to capture the zeitgeist of the time, it criticizes the film's problematic portrayal of class and gender, arguing that it ultimately offers a superficial and unfulfilling view of love.
encapsulated everything bad about Britain, not just our culture, but our entire self-fashioning. The editor said no – we had to draw a line somewhere. I deferred, which was annoying, because I was completely right; everything that’s wrong with that film was visible from space. And yet, give it its due, it caught the spirit of the age.
It has nauseating class politics: the central love affair, between Hugh Grant’s prime minister and Martine McCutcheon’s tea lady, is a fairytale precisely because its emotional centre is lottery-winner gratitude, that a prince might fall for a peasant. And this, looking back, was merely the benevolent, festive face of a derision for the working class that, some years later, my colleagueThe myriad outlandish ways it found to depersonify its female characters – make them silent (Keira Knightley, Lúcia Moniz)! Make them saints (Emma Thompson, Laura Linney)! Make them dead (Rebecca Frayn)! Give them a weight problem, even though they don’t have a weight problem, and anyway, what is a weight problem (McCutcheon)? – were an early iteration of the peculiar misogyny in what people now routinely call the “”. That film said a huge amount about the world we were in; it just didn’t say anything meaningful about love. Soaraway romcoms never do: they stand out precisely because they take a mood that’s collective – and consequently messy, complicated, contradictory, obscure – and distil it into something irreducible and unarguable.Photograph: Working Title/Allstar Twenty years later, it wasn’t Love Actually that Richard Curtis wanted to revisit, but Notting Hill – last month, he told IndieWire that he’d had an idea for a sequel, in which Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts got divorced, but Roberts had scotched it, thinking it a “”
Love Actually Rom-Com Richard Curtis Hugh Grant Class Politics Misogyny
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