Anne Hathaway, Meg Ryan or how the romantic comedy surfs the fourth feminist wave | Culture

As an older woman, Nora Ephron offered valuable advice to the new graduating class of her old college, Wellesley: “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” The phrase well summarizes the essence of one of the last innovators of a genre, that of romantic comedies, which is not going through its best moment. Her parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, Hollywood screenwriters and problem drinkers, wrote, among others, His other wife (19…

As an older woman, Nora Ephron offered valuable advice to the new graduating class of her old college, Wellesley: “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” The phrase well summarizes the essence of one of the last innovators of a genre, that of romantic comedies, which is not going through its best moment. Her parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, Hollywood screenwriters and problem drinkers, wrote, among others, His other wife (1957), in which Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy polished the famous “Long live the difference!” that Tracy had shot eight years earlier in the war of the sexes of a classic of the genre, Adam’s rib, by George Cukor. The advertising of His other wife sums up well how much things have changed in almost seventy years: “20th Century Fox introduces the guys and gals who make the office such a wonderful place to love.”

A few days ago, Meg Ryan, muse of the genre thanks to the films that Ephron wrote or directed in the eighties and nineties (When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got an Email, Something to Remember) and some others (French Kiss, Addicted to Love)promoted his latest work in Spain, What happens nextwhich he co-wrote, directed and starred in and which will be released on May 17. What happens next is part of what we can call autumn romantic comedy, like the recent Journey to paradise, with two other veterans, Julia Roberts and George Clooney, throwing things at each other’s heads. In Ryan’s film the plot focuses on the accidental reunion of an ex-couple (she and David Duchovny) who are trapped in an airport terminal. Once again, the plot seems to be torn between reckoning and melancholy over lost happiness.

In a recent interview with The New York TimesRyan confessed that he likes to watch Frank Capra’s romantic classics with his daughter and that, of course, there are still performers with enough charme to revive a genre that today maintains a complex balance with social changes and the advances of the fourth feminist wave, which has pointed out the problems contained in some of the stereotypes that this type of films propagate, many based on toxic and sexist romantic ideals.

Ryan Gosling or Jennifer Lawrence are part of Meg Ryan’s list. Not so Anne Hathaway, who returns to the genre that saw her star rise with The idea of ​​you, which premieres on Prime Video on May 2, directed by Michael Showalter and with Nicholas Galitzine as a dance partner. Based on a novel by Robinne Lee, the film tells the story of a forty-something gallery owner from Silver Lake who has not yet gotten over the fact that her husband left her for another woman and who has decided to park her heart in her freezer. That piece of ice will begin to melt the day when, accompanying her teenage daughter to the Coachella festival, her life intersects with that of a young Englishman, a member of a boy band prefab of global success. Obviously, the young man, rich and impetuous, falls in love with the attractive lady.

The idea of ​​you It pursues that acidic lightness that we expect from every romantic comedy, but, unfortunately, as happens with so many works of this genre, the fairy tale would have worked much better without so much sugar. That ubiquitous digital beauty canon that makes the age difference between Hathaway (41 years) and Nicholas Galitzine (29 years) almost imperceptible does not help either. It’s not about doing Harold and Maude (1971), Hal Ashby’s wonderful film about a young man and his elderly friend, but neither can a romantic comedy be built about the age difference if the generation gap is, visibly, so diffuse. Returning to the classics, George Cukor reflected it perfectly in the love affair between Jacqueline Bisset and Hart Bochner in Rich and famous (1981).

The other theme of the film is public ridicule, and here Hathaway, producer as well as protagonist, seems to talk more about herself than about her character. It’s hard not to see a reflection of yourself in The idea of ​​you, a woman who one day discovers the effects of viral hatred. The story is known: when the American actress won the Oscar for best supporting actress for The Miserables (2012) success cruelly turned against them and the digital hordes deployed what is today known as the Hathahate. The actress of The devil wears Prada either Princess by surprise He had to deal with public ridicule that had arisen a year earlier, in 2011, when he presented the Hollywood Awards gala with James Franco and the chemistry between the two was zero. The reasons for hatred? The widespread reproach was due to something as vague as his lack of naturalness, whether due to his rigid perfection or his constant search for approval. The ball grew so much —“They stopped giving me roles because they said my identity had become toxic,” the actress declared in a recent interview with Vanity Fair— that his name ended up being considered poison for the box office. Her pressure to reverse the situation became a problem that, as the actress has repeated, she only managed to overcome thanks to the filmmaker Christopher Nolan, who rescued her to Interstellar in 2014.

The idea of ​​you It also adds to that post-pandemic trend that leaves all the romantic comedies’ eggs in the same basket: that of the streaming. Two of the best comedies (just) from last season, American Fiction, and above all, Bottoms, They went in Spain directly to the platforms (Prime Video both) without going through theaters. However, recent successes, such as Anyone but you, They demonstrate the popular pull that, beyond its quality—which in this case is rather low—this genre continues to have. With Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell leading the cast, Anyone but you It is a prototypical romantic comedy, with a family wedding included, tourist postcards of sun and sand from Australia, pseudo-spicy dialogue and gym bodies.

Beyond the impossible titles, which seem more typical of a teenage newspaper (What happens next, The idea of ​​you, Anyone but you), the crisis of romantic comedies is also linked to an evident drought of leading men capable of swimming through the waters of the new masculinity with fewer biceps and more grace. Meanwhile, series like The bus girlspartly heir to one of the greatest classics of the genre, New Moon, by Howard Hawks, works as a romantic comedy within a profession, journalism, given, like so many others, to bed entanglements. At least this HBO Max product does comply with Nora Ephron’s maxim: her four main characters at least try to be the heroines of her own lives.