In 2003, I wanted to write a column about why Love Actually 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 colleague Owen Jones would describe in Chavs.
The 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 “nasty noughties”. 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.
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 “very poor idea”. Grant had already floated this unlikely notion – a romcom hingeing on a split – in 2020, saying in his urbane (and, OK, let’s be honest, extremely winning and likable) drawl: “I would like to do a sequel to one of my own romantic comedies that shows what happened after those films ended. Really, to prove the terrible lie that they all were, that it was a happy ending.” Again, this isn’t really about the reality of relationships – it hasn’t arrived as fresh news in the 2020s that couples don’t always stay together. That isn’t even the promise of the romcom – part of the intoxication is to freeze love in time and make its bliss impossibly perpetual.
The fact that divorce is threatening to feature in the romcom imagination speaks to a wider disappointment. The promise of Notting Hill was that this shambling bookseller, one foot in the past – Grant was standing in for Britain, here, as he very often does – could somehow hold enough charm for an international star. Roberts standing in not for the US, but for globalisation and modernity – that all our destinies would be intertwined and no one would get left behind. In the never-to-be-made sequel, Roberts would have to develop an opioid addiction, lose her career, but leave him behind anyway. That’s maybe why she thought this was a very poor idea.
Christmas romcoms are especially piquant because it’s the moment in the year most freighted with idealistic expectation. They invite you to confront where your life falls short of what you’d wish, and articulate, even if only internally, what those expectations are. The other two hits of the 00s, Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Holiday, said “come as you are”. It’s OK not to be perfect, to drink too much, to not know what to say, to show your arse on live TV (Bridget Jones); it’s OK to be chaotic (Kate Winslet), you still belong in the same universe and, ultimately, the same family, as the perfect (Cameron Diaz – sorry about the spoiler, guys). I’m not sure you could get away with that today; are any of us enough for the 2020s?
If the divorce romcom would be an outward expression of collective disappointment in the world’s broken promises – we thought we’d figured out how to do harmony, prosperity, progress; guess what, we hadn’t – then fine, maybe we need to say that out loud, with Christmas Kramer vs Kramer. I have nothing against divorce. But at some point we need to recover our faith in what’s possible, which we’ll know when we start making romcoms where people are in love because they’re smart, and they can defeat evil, and they have a dog. And no, I don’t just mean, remake The Thin Man.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
