AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
“A fine romance with no kisses.
A fine romance my friend this is.”
There’s no doubt about it, romance is a funny business. And it is a business, worth a billion dollars in Valentine’s Day card sales alone in the US, never mind the red roses, dinners for two and gifts. It’s odd to think that St Valentine’s Day might never have happened if the Emperor Claudius hadn’t decided that men made better soldiers if they weren’t married; all that pining to get home to the wife instead of waging war, I suppose.
Valentine did marry soldiers and, before being martyred, cured his jailer’s blind daughter and sent her a letter’ from your Valentine. The rest is history, remembered not only in cards but in books, films, operas and poems, celebrating the course of romance from the first encounter to the point when love has finally blossomed in both hearts, or maybe not – for our love affair with the genre comes in many variations.
A classic theme is the mismatch, where an unlikely pair end up together thanks to the intervention of a fairy godmother, or an imaginative author who comes up with a plot to unite the unlikely lovers. There are fairy stories like Cinderella, where put-upon little Cinders gets her Prince, after fitting into the glass slipper. Or that all-time favourite Jane Austen’s novel and subsequent films, ‘Pride And Prejudice’, where Eliza Bennet – despite her initial dislike of the aristocratic Fitzwilliam Darcy and his disdainful class consciousness – the pair end up in mutual acceptance. Proving the point of the opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Usually the leading lady is low status, never more so than in ‘Pretty Woman,’ where Vivian (Julia Roberts) starts out as a hooker, fronting as a companion for successful businessman Edward (Richard Gere). Roberts ends up as an elegant woman who reforms Gere’s asset-stripping business practices. Hard to beat the ending where Gere climbs a fire escape, rose in mouth, to claim Roberts.
Star-crossed lovers is another theme, perhaps most heart-rending of all Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo And Juliet’ where, for a start, the teenagers’ respective families are sworn enemies. Then the subterfuge of Juliet’s feigned death is mistaken for the real thing by Romeo who poisons himself, whereupon Juliet wakes and finding him dead, stabs herself with his dagger.
The ‘Oh no, why did it have to end that way’ love story, snatches away the expected happy ending. Casablanca, is a good example where (spoiler alert) Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), instead of boarding the plane to escape Casablanca, sends Isla (Ingrid Bergman) off with her husband Victor Laszlo and saying to her she may regret this “maybe not today, not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of your life”. Still there are some memorable one-liners to compensate: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world …”
Even worse are the endings where the romance terminates in tragedy like Puccini’s La Boheme, where poet Rondolfo and seamstress Mimi’s passion is cruelly snatched away by her death from tuberculosis.
Are books and films today becoming less romantic than those in the past like Margaret Mitchell’s novel’ Gone With The Wind ‘and film with Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable (1939) or Pasternak’s novel Dr Zhivago and film with Julie Christie and Omar Sharif (1969). I still can’t hear Lara’s theme without tearing up.
Maybe so. Think of Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’, where despite sex scenes in the TV adaptation which set Joe Duffy’s phone hopping with scandalised calls during the pandemic, the affair between Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar Jones) never blossoms into the real thing. Lack of commitment.
Then consider the choice of film for release on Valentine’s Day this year. It’s the latest adaptation of Emily Bronte’s hardly new 1847 novel, with its dark tale of passion and revenge between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.
Final question: which gender is the more romantic, male or female? Depends on the individual maybe, but I think women tend to watch and read more love fiction, while guys go in for real life pursuit.
A certain fellow won my heart with a bowl of snowdrops dug from his garden on our first date.
