‘Finding Emily’: Can a rom-com critique the genre and save it at the same time?
Like the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police, a lot of rom-coms are creepy tales of obsession disguised as grand romances, and I say that as someone who loves them (the movies, not the song).
From Meg Ryan stalking her way to true love in Sleepless in Seattle to Domhnall Gleeson using his powers of time travel to redo the past until Rachel McAdams finds him attractive in About Time (a la the even more problematic Groundhog Day), this genre can sometimes feel more like horror than romance. The new movie, Finding Emily, directed by Alicia MacDonald from a script by Rachel Hirons, does its best to confront the genre while also making a case for its revival.
The story follows Owen (Spike Fearn), an aspiring musician in Manchester who falls head over heels into infatuation when he meets undergraduate Emily (Sadie Soverall) at a party at the student union. They appear to be hitting it off, but the next day, when he tries to text her, he discovers that she missed a digit when she typed her number into his phone. Convinced that it was a mistake, Owen goes on an exhaustive search for her that makes him a viral figure on campus. Along the way, he’s helped by psychology undergraduate Emily (Angourie Rice), who thinks he’ll make the perfect case study for her dissertation on the destructive nature of romance.
Like all rom-coms, Finding Emily relies on a series of highly contrived coincidences, but by the time Owen’s hunt for the original Emily becomes the talk of the campus, it’s clear that MacDonald and Hirons are just as interested in subverting the genre’s conventions as retreading old territory. Owen is invited onto the campus podcast, hosted by a steely young woman “who looks like broadcast Barbie” and whose “hair smells like Christmas” but who is ruthless with her line of questioning. Is Owen a romantic or a stalker? Is he threatening the safety of the women on campus as the student body president argues, or is he demonstrating commendable levels of vulnerability?
The debate explodes on social media. One user declares Owen to be a “rapist virgin”, while others praise him for being uninhibited. One simply asks, “Can we please stop fetishising white guys who play guitar?”. It’s a rhetorical question, but decades of books, movies, billboard charts, and personal experience tell us that the answer is unequivocally no, for better or worse. As a group of Emilys and their allies gather on campus brandishing “I am Emily” signs, harkening back to Charlie Hebdo and #MeToo movements, Owen wonders, “When did everyone get so cynical?”
It’s a good question. When did everyone get so cynical? What does it mean to be a hopeless romantic at a time when dating apps have ruined romance through over-saturation and gamification, and social media has made everyone allergic to authenticity? Rom-coms require a certain level of idealism, and in a world in which romance has been dismembered into a list of pop-psychology-inflected pathologies and dating apps have deleted any notion of ‘The One’, how can anyone hold onto their romanticism, let alone admit to it?
In Finding Emily, this question is never quite answered because the script ultimately does fall into the well-worn tropes of the late 1990s, complete with one character running through city streets and a public declaration of love. Though the leads (Fearn in particular) offer winning performances, they lack the explosive chemistry that makes classic rom-coms unforgettable, even when they resort to plot contrivances. By the end, that central question about whether the genre can adapt to a romance-averse world is left unanswered because the tidiness of the resolution removes all the real-world friction that makes the question pertinent.
Ironically, the answer might lie in one of the first movies of the genre, Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of showing this movie to someone who hates rom-coms, only to watch as they become a blubbering mess by the end. Nora Ephron’s cutting script is written with cynics in mind. Harry (Billy Crystal) is about as curmudgeonly about the whole love thing as you can get, while Sally (Meg Ryan) is an idealist. Most of the movie revolves around their clash of beliefs, which evolves over their years-long friendship. In fact, the ending was only changed to a happy one when Reiner (on whom Harry is based) met his future wife, Michele Singer, and realised that maybe there was something to romance, after all.
In the following decades, rom-coms, and their female characters in particular, devolved into infantile fantasies, somehow growing increasingly problematic with every passing year. By the time 2009 rolled around and brought us the double whammy of The Ugly Truth (in which Katherine Heigl does her best imitation of Ryan’s famous restaurant scene while wearing a remote-controlled vibrator) and (500) Days of Summer (in which Zoë Deschanel plays the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl), the genre was no longer fit for purpose.
If there’s anything to be gleaned from Finding Emily, it’s that the principles of When Harry Met Sally are still the gold standard. The best rom-coms lean into the absurdity of romance in the context of real life rather than buffer themselves against it. Nearly four decades later, Reiner’s film is more relevant than ever.
