The Modern Romance

Romance has taken a beating these past few years at the multiplexes. I admit I'm an old softy, I do like romance, that's because movies make it better than in real life, in my opinion they're the reason people want to fall in love in the first place.

I'm not sure if I want to actually fall in love, because I might just be ultimately disappointed because it doesn't amount to what I see in he movies.

The real good romance movies are ones where we can actually see two people either in love or falling in love. This type of romance was done to perfection by the likes of Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Max Ophuls, or Douglas Sirk. Sometimes romance came in the comedy form like in Capra's "It's Happened One Night" or Lubitsch's "The Shop Around the Corner", or in the melodrama form like Sirk's "All that Heaven Allows", or that almost mystical form Ophuls' "The Earings of Madame de..."

Directors such as these knew that romance came down to love between two people, no matter how they got together.

There have been modern geniuses of the genre post-golden age, such as Woody Allen, who frankly modernized the romantic comedy with "Annie Hall", a film that broke convention by not having the two leads end up together in the end.

Many have followed Allen's style, and "Annie Hall" has been tried to be remade time and time again, by people who don't quite grasp the same sense of dialogue as the nebbish master.

Romance, has been diluted too much, filmmakers it would seem have relied on the old form and audience approval, the characters no longer seem real, or in love. Romantic comedies seem to be the usual punching bag, I haven't had the ambition to see anyone of the ones coming out (Usually starring Katherine Heigel or Jennifer Aniston but I'm not blaming them).

This may be just another nail in the cynical Hollywood coffin, they seem to think romance is a commodity, something to be exploited just like the lazy horror films that come out as well.

This is not to say romance is dead, it might just mean you have to look harder to find it. The best examples of modern romance I found recently come from Richard Linklater with his films "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset".

In "Before Sunrise", Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train and spend the film walking around Vienna and falling in love. At the end of the film, they go their separate ways probably knowing they will never see eachother again.

In the "Before Sunset", the couple meet again by chance in Paris nine years later, they pick up the conversation like they never missed a beat, they seem to know they are soul mates, and this time they are older and wiser.

These two films are lovely little snippets of life, perhaps Linklater thought the only way to put romance back in the movies was to strip away all artifice the movies have made you believe in and put the focus back on the people.

This type of idea would work again with John Carney's "Once" made in 2007, which was my choice for best film of the decade, if Linklater's film was about two people falling in love through communication, Carney's film was about two people who fall in love through music.

I love romantic movies, to me it works on a different spectrum from the horror film, yet both seem to be the perfect subject for cinema. Romance is difficult, but if you approach it in an honest in sincere way like you would any genre, chances are you would make people fall in love.