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In this chapter, Rafaele Ariano examines Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014) as a hybrid of the art film and the romantic comedy. Ariano conceptualizes the “art romantic comedy” as a sub-genre that targets audiences that would typically reject the romantic comedy based upon conventions of taste and cultural hierarchy. The chapter places Gondry in a cohort of contemporary auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola and Alexander Payne, whose romantic comedies are characterized by qualities drawn from art and indie cinema. These characteristics include the expressive use of film style and implementation of metafictional devices, complex “sensitive” protagonists, and endings that are ambiguous and thus only partially “happy.” Ariano applies this genre framework to an analysis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but also places the film within wider trends in the genre of romantic comedy.

Elaine May’s 1971 directorial debut, A New Leaf was a watershed moment within May’s career, but as a film important to the contemporary development of American comedy cinema. This chapter will examine A New Leaf as part of a greater comedic tradition, particularly in terms of pre-code and 1930s/1940s screwball comedy, later black comedies, and romantic comedies about unlikely couplings between unsympathetic protagonists, forging a connection between the theme of romance, finance, and mortality. This chapter argue that A New Leaf represents an important development in this subgenre, and examines A New Leaf in connection to the relatively unsentimental romantic comedies of the ‘60s and ‘70s concerned with unlikely couplings that concern an unlikely romance that develops as the result of a search for fortune.

This chapter shows how Shakespeare innovated his unique brand of romantic comedy under the influence of prose romance and Lyly’s dramatized romance. The resulting hybrid form was so successful that it is an underpinning structural formula for romantic comedy in many modern movies, even ones where Shakespeare is not a direct source. His most successful examples became conflated through the Western educational system into a recognisable and very flexible genre, tracing how ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’ through successive stages involving centrally an exotic, transforming location such as a forest. Even twentieth century critics such as Northrop Frye played their part in popularising the genre and paving the way into movies, because of their strong influence on students in the twentieth century.

The genre of the romantic comedy was domesticated in the studio era of Finnish cinema that lasted from the early 1930s to late 1950s by filmmakers who admired Hollywood films, an example of whom would be Valentin Vaala. This domestication was an easy process for the reason that romantic comedies are universal in tone, which means they can be set pretty much in any location, discuss context-specific problems related to relationships and be produced with the modest budgets of small nation cinemas. This has made the genre more than suited for Finnish cinema. Before analysing the Finnish films in detail, I am going to provide a quick background exploration of Finnish romantic comedies of the studio era in order to show the transformation.

‘Negotiating Special Relationships: Susanne Bier’s Comedies’ highlights the diversity of Bier’s films by analyzing her comedies, which, Gunhild Agger argues, borrow from and innovate characteristics derived from distinct romantic comedy traditions. Agger reads Bier’s The One and Only (Den eneste ene 1999) as a Danish language, screwball comedy best understood as a modern take on a template established by Classical Hollywood films. Meanwhile, Agger connects Love Is All You Need to trends in romantic comedy that are visible in more recent British and American films, most notably Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which inspired a number of transatlantic co-productions targeting the massive audience it attracted. In outlining key features of these films, Agger highlights that Love Is All You Need is significantly more cross-cultural and transnational than The One and Only and explicitly utilizes formal and narrative devices to cite its American and British predecessors. She also stresses that while the film is mainly in Danish, it includes aspects of English and Italian languages and cultures as part of its appeal to transnational spectators.

Romantic comedies have a difficult task before them, restoring our faith in a love that lasts. The sub-genre of the comedies of remarriage do this best of all rom-coms, by showing a divorced or alienated couple coming back together despite their difficulties. This furthers the myth that love conquers all, and that some couples were made for each other, with the distinct help of scintillating and hilarious conversation. This chapter analyses Cavell’s paradigm in his reading of The Philadelphia Story and demonstrates its contemporary relevance by applying it to one of the more philosophical of films of this century, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Is it possible to reclaim certain works as part of the feminist film canon, even if they were never intended as such? If Elaine May ever self-identified as a feminist, her public stance on the topic was one of comical obfuscation. This chapter reclaims May’s second film The Heartbreak Kid from the second-wave feminist critiques that dismissed it as sexist. It reads the film through a contemporary feminist lens, specifically looking at May’s framing of key scenes within the film as a representation of the ‘female gaze’. It looks closely at the contentious character of Lila (played by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin), who has been dismissed as many critics as a caricatured representation of Jewish womanhood, as key in May’s critique of both the character of Lenny and the filmic canon of her male contemporaries. May looks beneath the caricature represented by Lenny’s resentful and self-loathing gaze, and finds the humanity within Lila.

The subject of this chapter is Soviet urban romantic comedies. Despite the seemingly unsuitable setting of the first decades of Soviet rule, the chapter makes a case for the Soviet spaces, and Soviet forms of life, being an ideal context for vaudevillian misunderstandings, confusions, playful encounters, and romantic mishaps. At the same time, the genre was instrumental in teaching the Soviet audience to merge the private and the public, the intimate and the heroic into a harmonious whole. All the traditional markers of romantic comedy can be found in the texts presented, but the Soviet context and content make the Soviet urban comedy a unique form of popular entertainment and ideological training.

Chapter 6 begins by addressing in detail the Anglo-American debate on aesthetics in TV studies. It goes on to argue that a Mexican revisionist romantic comedy (shot by movie directors and starring a movie actress) can be read as an example of “centrifugal” cinematic television that expands its initial premise to embrace wide ranging social contexts. Conversely, a second series (a small scale drama on group therapy) is “centripetal,” burrowing into the complex psychologies of its characters. Both series thus engage in very different kinds of complexity that have, nonetheless, been linked to the aesthetics of quality television.

This chapter explores the idea of destiny and predetermination that is disrupted. These theme is found throughout Rilke’s work. The chapter uses the 1994 Hollywood romantic comedy, Only You as a backdrop for this concept.