Maybe we will have to widen our view on romantic comedies, as romantic
comedy had to be replaced by other genres and other forms of social
relations: Molly Haskell thought of Robert Redford and Paul Newman as the
most romantic couple of the late 60s and early 70s. William Paul says,
romantic comedy had to make room for buddy films or 'animal comedy' as a
move from the individual to the social. Whereas romantic comedy deals with
mutuality and intimacy, buddy films or animal comedies focus on democracy,
sexual liberation and equality. But they have to pay the price of a
vulgarization of sexuality; they lack, as Paul argues, the "spiritual grace"
of a romantic comedy such as "The Awful Truth".
Stanley Cavell's "Pursuits of Happiness" is about the spiritual grace of
classic romantic comedy, Cavell says, that in some sense the genre of comedy
of remarriage (as a subgenre of romantic comedy, which Cavell invented for
his book) cannot be remade. He refers to that "unadoptability" in a text on
"Mr. and Mrs. Smith": There might be some interaction between the Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie that resembles the interactions between Cary Grant and
Irene Dunne - but shooting at each other is not the same as talking with
each other.
I always wondered why "Intolerable Cruelty" was such an intolerable film. It
suffers from the same deficit as "What's Up, Doc" - an almost complete lack
of any notion of what the "spiritual grace" in romantic comedy was really
about, or what was really entertaining about screwball comedies. That's why
such and other films ("For Weddings and an Funeral") are called, according
to Frank Krutnik, "deception narratives", which means that the films exploit
the concept and motif of romantic comedy without exploring its conditions or
without adding anything new to it.
Eric Rohmer was a good suggestion in this discussion. I think you have to go
to other places and other films to find a convincing reinvention of romantic
comedy. "Trust" by Hal Hartley for example still has some spiritual grace.
Herbert
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