Love hurts: Canadian romantic comedy

TAKE ONE, Spring, 1999 by Steve Gravestock

When I told friends that I was writing an article about Canadian romantic comedies, I was met with blank stares or apprehensive grimaces. Some wondered if there were any; some scrambled for titles; others flatly stated that the few Canadian entries in this genre were neither romantic nor especially funny. And, until recently, it would be hard to disagree. Canadian romantic comedies have been few and far between.

But in the last two years, there's been a virtual explosion of homegrown comedies--coming from almost every region. The list includes: Mina Shum's Drive, She Said; Denis Villeneuve's Un 32 aout sur terre; Piers Haggard's Conquest; John Kalangis's Jack & Jill; Bruce McCulloch's Dog Park; Michael Kennedy's Joe's Wedding; and Jerry Ciccoritt's Boy Meets Girl. Yet, not a single one of these films actually plays by the rules. Separately, they all maintain an uneasy relationship with the format, but, together, they suggest a surprisingly consistent Canadian antipathy towards the genre, at least in its classical form. Unlike their American counterparts, Canadian comedies seem far more cautious and forlorn. If the Hollywood version ends by finding stability in couples (no matter how mismatched), the typical Canadian comedy leaves its participants alone and somehow fulfilled. Perhaps even more interestingly, they take off from a point that invokes their Canadian predecessors, as few and far between as they are.

The romantic comedy hit its creative peak in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s with the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges and the Astaire-Rogers romances. James Harvey, in his classic study Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, outlines a few key characteristics: these films were overwhelmingly urban, revelling in city life; they abhorred pretension (a trait they normally associated with class and privilege) while valorizing bedlam and anarchy. Screwball comedy was, as Pauline Kael pointed out, "the comedy of a country which didn't yet hate itself."

As Harvey notes, these films also reflected an uninhibited self-confidence. The couples made (or usually broke) rules as they went along, and they functioned as stand-ins for the American psyche itself. They were a mixture of self-assertion and self-criticism, a combination that exuded a sense of possibility and freedom.

The key Canadian romantic comedies came in the 1980s, but from the outset they defined themselves in opposition to their American cousins, rewriting or reversing the course they introduced. In films like Bringing Up Baby et al., the anarchic elements or characters are almost always incorporated into the film's conclusion, establishing a risky, but workable (and usually sexual) duality. In the Canadian version, the anarchy is almost always summarily dispelled and almost never split along sexual lines. In Yves Simoneau's Perfectly Normal, the life-force Turner (Robbie Coltrane) rescues his near-catatonic buddy Lorenzo (Michael Riley) from a lifetime of insomnia and loneliness. (After his mother's death, he falls into a deep depression, spending every night driving a taxi to escape himself.) Lorenzo picks up Turner in his cab and the latter moves in, convincing him to open a restaurant--and sing Bellini's Norma in drag. Eventually, Turner instils Lorenzo with enough courage so that he winds up in the arms of Denise (Deborah Duchesne) who's been obsessed with Lorenzo for quite a while. In turn, Turner is forced to beat an extremely hasty retreat out of town. (Something similar occurs in Don Shebib's underrated and underseen Heartaches. Margot Kidder's pushy, anarchic Rita is left in the cold at the conclusion--despite having saved the timid heroine Bonnie (Annie Potts). Perfectly Normal is also important for another reason--it introduces the Canadian romantic hero, a man who's acted on by others in his best interest.

In Bruce McDonald's Highway 61, the set-up screams romantic comedy; but the film quickly turns into a voyage of self-discovery. Mildly catatonic, slightly stuck-up, small-town barber Pokey (Don McKellar) is conned by an exuberant, immoral roadie (Valerie Buhagiar) into helping her transport a suspicious corpse across the border. After being separated and threatened, the pair reunites, both wiser and less selfish. Yet, unlike their American counterparts, they mature independently--not because of one another. The film's key point isn't so much that the two get together; it's that Pokey comes out of his shell and goes to places he probably would have only dreamed about. (See also Mina Shum's Double Happiness where the romance is more backdrop than foreground.)

Each of the romantic comedies made in the last two years grapples with this tradition, and their inability or refusal to accept the premises of American romantic comedy--then and now. Among the current crop, Michael Kennedy's Joe's Wedding is the only film that adheres to the conventions of classic screwball comedy consistently. Failed alternative rocker Joe (D. W. Moffet), a distant, slightly brawnier cousin of Lorenzo, abandons music after one disastrous booze-fuelled performance. A few years later he's about to marry Melissa, the uptight daughter of Rankin (Harvey Atkin), a sleazy developer who likes to tear down buildings and put up parking lots. But four days before the wedding, Joe is kidnapped by the seemingly deranged Uta (Kate Vernon), a performance artist who has been victimized by Rankin and now wants revenge. Soon enough Joe falls for Uta and the wedding is off.