The arrival of that film and other events, such as the premiere of ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ (2018), ‘The Lost City’ (2022), ‘Bros. More than friends’ (2022) and ‘Journey to paradise’ (2022), or the spectacular success of the film Netflix ‘To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’ (2018), which has two sequels, give rise to wondering if we are facing a revival of the comedy romantic of the 80s and 90s. If so, what do the ‘romcoms’ of the present have to do with ‘When Harry Met Sally…’ or ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ (1997)? They’ve been updated? Where do they bloom?

2018: Attempt at revival

For Ainhoa ​​Marzol, Internet and popular culture expert, “there was an attempt to revive the ‘romcom’ in 2018, following the success of ‘To all the boys I fell in love with’. It is more or less when streaming platforms begin to settle and discover that a genre that has not worked on the big screen for years works well on the small screen. Besides, At the budget level they are nonsense. When the theaters were reserved for Marvel-type blockbusters and everything else was kind of pushed out of the theaters, The platforms recovered the romcom and gave us the option to see it in its ideal habitat: with a blanket and a bowl of ice cream”. Quim Casas, critic of this house, programmer and teacher, supports Marzol’s arguments: “As intermediate production disappears, some film models have found their place on the platforms. An analogy could be made with horror films. Many of the most stimulating proposals of this genre have come from the platforms.”

A little context

To know if these films have the spirit of the romantic comedy of the 80s and 90s, it is essential to understand what those films were like and why they defined an era. According to Casas, “those romcoms adapted very well the model of the romantic comedies of the 50s and 60s, those of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, updating them to the times. The famous orgasm sequence from ‘When Harry Met Sally…’ would have been impossible in the ’50s. The other thing they knew how to do is find couples who fit that line of work, like Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.”

Perhaps our memory of these films is conditioned by nostalgia. There is a natural tendency to remember them as fresh, honest and kind proposals, like romantic comedies free of cynicism that even allowed themselves to be cheesy. The critic, teacher and essayist Carlos Losilla, however, is more skeptical: “In general, the romantic comedy of those years caught me a little off guard. It was difficult for me to see Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal imitating Woody Allen and Diane Keaton when they imitated Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. The romantic comedy of the 1930s had one advantage: it was not romantic, in the most superficial sense of the word. Well, yes it was, but romanticism arose from something different, from everyday contact, from friendship, from work, and instead In those films from the 80s and 90s I saw too much construction, too much self-awareness. Now I know that was the point, but maybe it’s too late. Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron were actually emulators of David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson, from their first films: an American cinema that was born from reflection on previous American cinema”.

Nostalgia and updating

And where does the current romcom come from? Does it move within the parameters of nostalgia? Do you reflect on gender? Do you make an effort to adapt to the present? Marzol establishes the following distinction: “There are two types of romcoms, one is the ‘unapologetically’ romcomianas and they follow patterns that have been repeated for years, without the slightest of changes, in the purest Hallmark style, without being ashamed of themselves. And then there are those who try to dress up as something new. There are probably people who enjoy the first ones with a certain irony, but I also think there are viewers who see them completely seriously. The success of ‘A Christmas Prince’ (2017) on Netflix was too big for people to be enjoying it with irony.”

In relation to this second type of romantic comedy, the one that tries to adapt to the times, it is interesting to determine if it is a superficial update or if it takes into account, for example, issues of gender representation (and representation in general) or reflects really what romantic relationships are like in the present. “Most do, but often only in a cosmetic way. I think of ‘Fire Island’ (2022), which is the adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to an island in New York where gay boys go to party. On ‘Fire Island’, with its one-night stands, Grindr and many shirtless men, There is very little of the super-puritanical society that Jane Austen tells. But even so, they limit themselves to taking the skeleton of a story that works and putting a new skin on it. In the end there is an effective formula and you need to follow it for your film to work, no matter how much you include women who do not need men or how much in LGBTQ+ communities the problems and nuances are very different from those in conservatively heterosexual environments” , argues Marzol.

Quantitative rebirth

Ainhoa ​​Marzol cites among the most stimulating romantic comedies of recent years ‘To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’, ‘How to Get Rid of Your Boss’ (2018), ‘Palm Springs’ (2020), ‘The Lost City’ and ‘Rye Lane’ (2023). However, although there are interesting proposals (she would personally add ‘The Season of Happiness’, from 2020), everything seems to indicate that This rebirth of the romantic comedy is more quantitative than qualitative. When asked if, since the romantic comedy of the 80s and 90s was consumed, there has really been a high point in the genre, Losilla and Casas agree on the same figure: Judd Apatow.

“I like the comedies of the 2000s, which do seem like an important renewal to me, a reversal of what had happened in the genre at the end of the century. ‘Embarrassing Me’ seems to me to be a great romantic comedy of our time. When romanticism seems lost forever, Apatow resurrects it from the detritus he had left behind, from the bad taste in the adolescent and youthful mouth, as if Antoine Doinel and the Free Cinema boys became complete hooligans and, from there, rediscovered romanticism,” argues Losilla.

Casas, who highlights ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ (Paul Feig, 2011), produced by Apatow, also focuses on those comedies and clarifies that they should not be understood as a revival of the comedies of the 80s and 90s: “’My Best Friend’s Wedding’ and, in general, the films that Apatow directed and produced at that time, proposed a different model. If it was a rebirth it was a different rebirth. They could connect with other types of romantic comedies at a structural level, like those from the 50s and 60s, but they proposed very new things, such as the way of conceiving female characters.”