The 2019 Women Make Waves Film Festival takes place from 10/4 to 10/14 at SPOT Huashan Cinema in Taipei. This review is based on a complimentary media screener.

The News Lens
Date: 2019/10/03
By: CJ Sheu

If you go back and rewatch your favorite romantic comedies, chances are they’ll be pretty bad (except for When Harry Met Sally which premiered in 1989). The male gaze is obnoxiously obvious, women are created according to male desires in lieu of having actual personalities, and toxic masculinity is depicted as not just a but the successful romantic strategy. And yet there’s something undeniably endearing about watching two attractive people seek love in the thorny thickets of offensive writing and prurient camera direction.

Romantic Comedy (2019), by writer-director-editor-narrator Elizabeth Sankey, is a 78-minute found footage documentary that crafts this fundamental tension of the genre into an argument for a better rom-com. It’s a labor of love: The film begins by recounting Sankey’s formative obsession with the genre as a young girl, and at one point she admits to having seen Sleepless in Seattle (1993) 35 times. She was motivated to make the film when she began to see the genre’s glaring imperfections after she got married, a life stage where rom-coms don’t often offer a playbook.

The film starts with rom-coms from the pre-code era, when the lower cultural cachet of the cinema afforded women and minorities more opportunities. It then traverses the heightened gender normativity of the war years, highlighting the subversively sexual but all too brief presence of Marilyn Monroe before settling into an analysis of rom-com tropes from the ‘80s onward.

Joining Sankey are a chorus of her friends and fellows from the film industry, who offer observations and criticisms of their own favorite films (1995’s While You Were Sleeping gets an eye-opening deconstruction), often based on their identities as not cishet, White, and/or men.
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