Much like melodramas, which were historically labelled as “women’s films”, rom-coms are often perceived as lowbrow “chick-flicks”, dismissed for being feminine-coded media. Meet-cutes, love at first sight, last-minute chases through an airport… This may not occur much in everyday life.
But are there any rom-coms that feel like they might just happen? Nora Ephron’s trilogy of rom-coms (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail) each stars Meg Ryan as a romantic lead. Somewhere in between the blind optimism of Meg Ryan’s protagonists and her love interest’s cynicism lies something that could resemble realism.
Rom-coms often hinge on a far-fetched premise that acts as the springboard for romantic drama to ensue. Instead, Ephron subverts the conventional meet-cute in When Harry Met Sally by introducing the two romantic leads as graduates who apathetically car-share on their journey to New York, where they intend to part ways and live out separate lives.
The pair fiercely debate whether men and women can really be friends and spend years apart before even a faint flicker of “what if” begins to spark between them. During their eventual friendship, the pair get a glimpse into the psyche of the opposite sex and learn about love with frank honesty, leading to Harry Burns’ (Billy Crystal) famous revelation that the women in his life really have faked it. Love at first sight is the last thing that Ephron promotes in her most beloved script.
Sleepless in Seattle may be the most far-fetched of the Ephron rom-coms, but the film balances unrealistic romantic gestures—like meeting your soulmate on top of the Empire State Building—with a focus on the very real, deep grief that Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) experiences as a widower.
The film’s self-reflexive humour about rom-com viewership is shown best when Annie (Meg Ryan) and Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) spend their evening indulging in classical Hollywood weepies. As Annie gets drawn in by the emotional drama of An Affair to Remember, Becky cuttingly comments, “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie!”
Sleepless in Seattle shows affection for those of us who use rom-coms to help understand our own emotions and plays with the idea of whether destiny determines our romantic lives or if it’s all sheer dumb luck.
The rom-com boom of the 1990s gives us a wealth of material to escape reality with, but what you may find yourself romanticising the most is how offline the interactions between the characters are. The distinct lack of technology within the films of this era feels a world away from the current dating landscape, which relies so heavily on Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder. But when technology does appear within these films, it feels adorably antiquated, with Kathleen Kelly using dial-up internet to message her chatroom crush on AOL in You’ve Got Mail.
Ephron’s 1998 classic offers audiences a digital love story. What is now standard practice was once a new-age notion. Let’s be honest—when was the last time you heard of a couple meeting each other in real life?
For some, the lack of romance in Edinburgh’s air could leave us feeling weary, especially if we’re on a healthy diet of terrible Netflix rom-coms that warp our expectations of love. But Richard Curtis, eternal optimist that he is and Britain’s custodian of the rom-com, believes people fall in love every single day, so why should a film that depicts this natural phenomenon be seen as a “sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world”? Maybe it’s time to subscribe to Curtis’ school of thought and realise that “love actually is all around.”
Ephron’s rom-coms depict characters who ultimately get their happy endings, but through subverting genre tropes or lovingly poking fun at the genre it works within, her films provide viewers with stories that feel recognisable and cosy. I don’t know anyone like Ryan Gosling’s character in The Notebook, but I know far too many Billy Crystals from When Harry Met Sally.
Illustration by Lucy Wellington