Streaming: the joy of romcoms

Romantic comedies are a perennially undervalued genre: even very fine ones are often described as “guilty pleasures”. That’s always a nonsense term, given that no pleasure is without value or grace – least of all these days. Under lockdown, don’t you find yourself more inclined towards romantic comedies both great and mediocre, to sink yourself in the familiar warmth of stories driven by love and tenderness, where everything tends to turn out fine?

Mubi has thus chosen an opportune moment to premiere Romantic Comedy, a spry, affectionate documentary by musician turned film-maker Elizabeth Sankey that gives this maligned genre its due. A short, accessible film essay that did the festival rounds last year, it cuts to the heart of why romcoms have to work harder to be taken seriously – hint: they tend to prioritise the female viewer – and unpicks their history of flawed gender politics and heteronormative bias. But it’s a loving exercise, overlaid with droll personal commentary, and one that will have you jotting down a playlist of films to watch right after.

To look at many streaming platforms, you’d be forgiven for thinking barely any romcoms existed before the 1990s. Thanks to agreeable recent confections such as Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Netflix may be the name credited with reviving popular interest in the genre, but its selection of romcoms it hasn’t made is a bit on the lean side. It does offer two cast-iron modern classics in When Harry Met Sally and Groundhog Day, plus the ever-underrated delights of Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock’s sparky chemistry in Two Weeks Notice, the bright, snappy Think Like a Man, and Steve Martin’s gently daffy Cyrano de Bergerac reworking Roxanne. But for more vintage or unusual pleasures, you’ll need to hunt elsewhere.

You can count on the BFI Player to class things up a bit, starting with 1955’s Smiles of a Summer Night by Ingmar Bergman: certainly not the first name you’d associate with romantic comedies, but this witty roundelay of midsummer desires proved he could twinkle with the best of them. Eric Rohmer cornered the market in bittersweet arthouse romantic comedy, and two lovely examples are here. Pauline at the Beach is feathery and melancholy at once, as it probes a teenage girl’s first foray into adult holiday romance, but The Green Ray is transcendent, following with aching wit and compassion the fits and starts of a single woman’s quest to find companionship over the course of one long, hot summer. It’s accompanied by an introduction from our own Mark Kermode, who also paid his respects to the genre in a dedicated episode of his Secrets of Cinema series on the BBC iPlayer – neat complementary viewing to Sankey’s film.

If you fancy the peerless romantic comedies of Hollywood’s golden age, Amazon Prime has a genuine buried treasure in Gregory La Cava’s 1936 jewel My Man Godfrey, which tends to get less canonised than screwball peers such as The Philadelphia Story (on Amazon too, and still a perfect sponge cake of a movie). But it’s effortlessly fast, diamond-sharp stuff, wringing slightly barbed laughs from its upstairs-downstairs premise before rosy feelings win out. Over at iTunes, you can find perhaps my all-time favourite romantic comedy, The Lady Eve, the gleaming zenith of Preston Sturges’s considerable career. Barbara Stanwyck was born to deliver his lickety-split dialogue, and her zesty partnership with Henry Fonda’s nebbishy ophiologist is the opposites-attract dynamic to beat them all.

If your romcom tastes veer less traditional, meanwhile, there’s something out there for you, be it the erotically charged clash of heat, hormones and ham in Bigas Luna’s Jamón Jamón (Amazon); the smart feminism of Obvious Child (iTunes), with abortion as its daring romantic starting point; Harold and Maude’s riotous, still-subversive reversal of a conventional May-December age gap (Amazon Prime); or Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said (Chili), whose everyday love story between two middle-aged divorcees (exquisitely played by James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is special for its very ordinariness. There are as many flavours of romcom out there as there are of romance: shed the guilt, keep the pleasure.

More titles new to streaming this week

Jojo Rabbit
(Disney, 12)
Taika Waititi’s Oscar-winning Holocaust comedy makes its way to our living rooms, where it can continue to aggressively divide opinion. This critic finds it a noxiously twee infantilisation of tragedy; others have been moved to tears. It’s worth seeing where you stand.

Bombshell
(Lionsgate, 15)
The downfall of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes following multiple charges of sexual assault should have made for fiery drama, but Jay Roach’s film hedges its bets politically. It gets by on Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie’s committed performances.

And Then We Danced
(Saffron Hill, 15)
Georgian traditional dance turns out to be sexier than you’d have guessed in Swedish-Georgian film-maker Levan Akin’s sweetly sensual gay romance, powered by a killer debut turn from Levan Gelbakhiani as an erotically awakened young dancer.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse
(Eureka, 12)
Fritz Lang’s final film – a labyrinthine, inkily atmospheric return to the shape-shifting occult villain he’d last visited three decades earlier – gets an elaborate Blu-ray rerelease worthy of the film’s dark, nasty majesty.