STUDIES AND RESEARCH

Recent Romantic Comedy

The author reviews the genre of romantic comedy of the 1990s and underlines the conflict in its definition: the films are a certain hybrid of romance and comedy. Romantic comedy assumes the myth of romantic love from the romance, the idea of a mythical bond between man and woman, but moderates sentimentality with the accent on the conflict of the sexes, a series of antagonisms and various obstacles, which create the necessary dramaturgical tension transferred from the screwball comedy, and some newer comical genre tendencies. Romantic comedy is not subversive, it does not subvert the social tradition from which it sprang, it rather revaluates it in the mythical and conservative sense establishing its use, and in that view has an ethical purpose. You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998), While You Were Sleeping (Jon Turteltaub, 1997), Runaway Bride (Garry Marshall, 1999), Sleepless In Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), The Green Card (Peter Wier, 1990), Four Weddings and Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994), French Kiss (Lawrence Kasdan, 1995), Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999) are some of the films the author reviews for his analysis of class, social, geographical and national-cultural obstacles to creating a male-female union. He indirectly questions the motive of national identity in romantic comedy, reviews the question of marriage from different viewpoints, and the issue of lie or keeping a secret, which is usually the basis for the plot. The author concludes that multiple layers of a romantic comedy are not a result of just the above-mentioned motives. They arise from socially conditioned motives of the characters, their family backgrounds, and a series of details highlighted by visual or the speech; elements which have great symbolic value in the interpretation of the protagonists’ relationships.

Tomislav Čegir