Richard Curtis’ romantic comedies may be bad for women, but I’ll never stop watching them.

About five years ago it was very fashionable to call old cultural objects “problematic.” Nothing has irritated Twitter (it was Twitter back then) more than the (sometimes legitimate) revelation that a favorite movie or TV show is actually bad. About homophobic jokes in Friends Danny trying to grope Sandy Thicknothing was protected from the rigor of 140 characters.

Nothing angered middle England more than headlines about how addictive Twitter was – and why no one was allowed to enjoy it. But by now we’re all tired of this dance – especially since progressive identity politics is no longer a fringe movement, and most sane people agree, which raises some eyebrows (Martin Scorsese’s convenient exclusion of normal-looking women). this is very disappointing(Little Britain) and this is probably a reasonable joke(Fawlty Towers‘ “Germans”).

However, this rather old-fashioned conversation was revived this weekend at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in an interview with film director Richard Curtis, hosted by none other than his own daughter. Curtis is known for creating some of the most popular romantic comedies of the late 90s and early 2000s. Notting Hill, Four weddings and a funeral, Real love AND Bridget Jones’s Diary. Over the years, these films have become known to some people for their whiteness, chic and traditional heterosexual romance, as well as a cozy, slightly literary, very “British” form of macrocosmic ASMR.

And so Curtis’s 28-year-old daughter Scarlett gave him a quirk. “In recent years, there has been increasing criticism of the way women and people of color are treated in your films,” she said after specific allegations were made of “multiple stories of inappropriate behavior by bosses.” Real loveincluding the Prime Minister”, “the noticeable absence of people of color in a film called Notting Hill – one of the birthplaces of the British black civil rights movement” and jokes about women being fat. Curtis said he regretted many of the works and their jokes about women – such as Martine McCutcheon’s portrayal of the Prime Minister’s mistress Natalie having “hips like tree trunks” or that Bridget Jones was “always going to be a little fat” . – “stupid and wrong.”

If you’re also not sure whether it’s more boring to call all of Curtis’s work unfeeling bile or to call woke society the death knell of a culture, welcome to the safe space: here we can whisper that some of the material is a little half-hearted. and we need to talk about the impact it had on the people of that time. At the same time, we are all mature enough to continue to enjoy our favorite films with appropriate understanding. As a feminist whose favorite movie is without a doubt Bridget Jones’s DiaryI feel comfortable expressing this position.

As Curtis told his daughter, no one at the time thought the nasty innuendo was malicious. Of course, this is part of their problem. Women who internalized the fact that Renée Zellweger was “a little fat” like Bridget Jones was a size 10 didn’t think it was malicious either – they thought it must mean they were malicious. Certainly fat and it was bad. But it is also true that these films were part of a wider landscape: in which women were under intense pressure to lose weight and get married, and, speaking of wider themes of “diversity”, in which they had an emphasis, as Hugh Grant. Notting Hill was naturally charming. As for the “inappropriate behavior of the boss,” I don’t need to point out that sometimes people get killed in movies and Grant flirts with it. Real love is an intentional target of humor and sexuality, and Bridget Jones also unintentionally flirts with her boss Daniel Cleaver (also played by Grant) by asking, “How dare you sexually assault me ​​in such a brazen manner?”

It is clear, therefore, that many of these so-called indiscretions were satirical, or at least self-conscious; When I read them carefully, they were observations on the very real standards they were held to at the time. As films age, they become artifacts, vignettes of the time in which they were made, to be enjoyed or not, depending on the audience’s choices. When I look Real love, Four weddings or Notting HillI realize that I’m watching a movie that was made twenty years ago, that it’s going to be a middle-class movie, that there’s going to be a gorgeous, mischievous male cast, and that the female cast is going to be all about love and romance. Body image – Just like when I read a Jane Austen novel, I know that the characters will be much more concerned with finding a husband and getting a dowry at 23 than would be acceptable in 2023.

If this all sounds something like this: “If you say you’re English now, you’ll end up in prison,” then I’d like to clarify. When I was a teenager, I started watching Richard Curtis films, and my friends and I internalized a lot of messages that I wanted to avoid – about bodies, female sexuality, expectations about how many times someone will be kissed passionately in their life. and gently. falling snow and yes, white Notting Hill.

But rather than criticizing them for their mistakes, it would be more productive to ask whether the films we are making now are interesting, relevant, new and representative. Spoiler: old ones rarely meet these criteria. But they are still funny, touching and comforting, giving us valuable insight into times gone by so that we can, if we see fit, move on to get better.