![]() ![]() While Sam is seemingly more open to notions of true love, he believes he has had his one chance at romance and won’t find anyone as special as his late wife – he even evidences Fatal Attraction as a reason why he shouldn’t meet Annie, effectively a stranger to him at this point. The magic of destiny and of the very constellations that form the backdrop of the film is refuted by Annie in the opening scenes, as she protests to her mother that “destiny is something we’ve invented because we can’t stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental”. ![]() As friend Becky remarks to Annie, “you don’t wanna be in love, you wanna be in love in a movie”, highlighting that reality often differs greatly from the epic love stories we watch and swoon over on screen. This is perhaps representative of how Ephron pushes against and even questions the legitimacy of well-established tropes from romcoms, exploring how these movies affect our perceptions and expectations of love. However, Sam immediately rejects this comparison, dismissing it as a “chicks’ movie”. Its likeness is explicitly alluded to by the characters when Sam tells his sister about Annie’s request to meet on Valentine’s Day, she is reminded of the classic film and proceeds to emotionally and somewhat comically summarise the romantic plot. For example, it was partly inspired by the 1957 romance An Affair to Remember, which starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. In some ways, Sleepless in Seattle is a film about films. What’s more, the fact that the two leads don’t actually meet properly until the final scene means there is practically no physical intimacy, therefore accidentally adhering to the Production Code that characterised the screwball genre – a somewhat refreshing throwback to classical Hollywood. It arguably borrows from the screwball comedy, a subgenre popular in the 1930s and 40s, in the elements of farce and misunderstanding within the plot. The sequence of stars and constellations, that seems to foreshadow the key themes of fate and destiny, is set to Jimmy Durante’s ‘As Time Goes By’, a song perhaps best known from the soundtrack of Casablanca. ![]() Sleepless in Seattle contains many nods to more traditional romantic comedies, and the first example of this is within the opening credits. Ephron can be seen to have redefined the concept of the romantic comedy in her films, but perhaps Sleepless in Seattle, which she both wrote and directed, is of particular interest – a movie that takes from yet disputes the cinematic past. When Sam’s son Jonah phones up a radio station and says his dad needs a new wife, Annie hears and becomes attached to a man she has never met. The 1993 flick starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (who went on to star in You’ve Got Mail together) follows Sam (Hanks), a single parent struggling to move on after his wife’s death, and Annie (Ryan), who is happily engaged yet missing the ‘magic’ that she sees in the movies. Perhaps the first film that springs to mind is When Harry Met Sally (1989), about whether men and women can ever be just friends, or You’ve Got Mail (1999), an early insight into the perils of online dating. The late writer and director is synonymous with the genre and, according to critics, “changed the way an entire generation fell in love” through her body of work. If you were asked to name an iconic romantic comedy, it wouldn’t be a surprise if your answer was one of Nora Ephron’s offerings. ![]()
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