Eliz­a­beth Sankey on decon­struct­ing the rom-com

When Eliz­a­beth Sankey was young, she fell head over heels in love with the rom-com. Her first fling was with Work­ing Girl fol­lowed close­ly by When Har­ry Met Sal­ly… and then all of Nora Ephron’s ​’90s roman­tic come­dies. ​“I would go to the cin­e­ma and watch them with my mum,” she explains. ​“I nev­er dreamed about get­ting mar­ried but I always dreamed about falling in love.”

A few years ago, Sankey want­ed to take her love for the genre and inter­ro­gate it cre­ative­ly. Her band, Sum­mer­camp, were set to release a new album but they want­ed to do some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Hav­ing just worked on the sound­track for Beyond Clue­less, Char­lie Lynne’s decon­struc­tion of the teen movie, Sankey was inspired to do some­thing sim­i­lar with the rom-com. ​“Then in the process of actu­al­ly mak­ing the film, it became more than I thought it was going to on a per­son­al lev­el,” Sankey says. ​“And I fell in love with mak­ing films.”

In Roman­tic Com­e­dy, Sankey takes view­ers on a crash course of the genre, start­ing with the great screw­ball roman­tic come­dies of the ​’30s and ​’40s. ​“They’re far more sub­ver­sive than you might think,” she says. ​“There weren’t that many women in the work­place so it wasn’t a threat to have a very capa­ble woman in the work­place on screen. So Hildy in His Girl Fri­day can give as much as Wal­ter and not be a threat.”

While in ear­ly Hol­ly­wood films there was more free­dom to allude to sex, when the Motion Pic­ture Pro­duc­tion Code came into effect, cen­sor­ing on-screen ​“immoral” behav­iour, any ref­er­ences to sex had to be tak­en out and nar­ra­tives, par­tic­u­lar­ly female roles, became more con­ser­v­a­tive. Things changed again when Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe came along. ​“There were all these sex come­dies with Mar­i­lyn hav­ing all this pow­er,” Sankey explains. ​“It’s such a del­i­cate, clever thing she does: she’s so con­fi­dent in sec­tions but nobody finds it threat­en­ing. And then she died and Doris Day stepped in on the last film Mar­i­lyn was going to do. I love Doris but she had a ten­den­cy to take parts that were a lit­tle more chaste. I don’t think the genre real­ly changed much after that in terms of how women were represented.”

Sankey’s film decon­structs the time­worn tropes estab­lished in Day’s time, pay­ing close atten­tion to films from the ​’90s and ear­ly 2000s that Sankey came of age watch­ing. ​“I came to Roman­tic Com­e­dy with the per­spec­tive of hav­ing once loved these films,” she says, ​“and now, as a fem­i­nist in my thir­ties, I couldn’t feel com­fort­able watch­ing them with­out notic­ing all of these prob­lem­at­ic ele­ments. I was orig­i­nal­ly going to just drag the genre and talk about all these things that are real­ly ter­ri­ble about the films, but then I realised I only have one per­spec­tive: as a white, straight, cis­gen­der woman from a priv­i­leged, mid­dle-class back­ground. These films were basi­cal­ly made for me, so what’s it like watch­ing them if you’re not a white, straight, cis­gen­der, priv­i­leged woman?”

For that rea­son, Sankey want­ed Roman­tic Com­e­dy to fea­ture as many dif­fer­ent voic­es as pos­si­ble, with oth­er speak­ers con­tribut­ing their per­spec­tives along­side Sankey. ​“We were talk­ing about Nev­er Been Kissed. To me that’s such a bat-shit film about a school­teacher falling in love with a stu­dent but Cameron Cook, one of the con­trib­u­tors, said that actu­al­ly the film meant a lot to him as a gay teenag­er who hadn’t been kissed in school. It made me realise that despite there being a lot of prob­lem­at­ic ele­ments in rom-coms, they also have a lot of pow­er and maybe that pow­er can be used for good.”

The genre’s poten­tial nar­ra­tive pow­er in its sim­ple nar­ra­tive arc was one of the rea­sons why Sankey want­ed to high­light the lack of rep­re­sen­ta­tion in roman­tic come­dies. ​“That’s what’s amaz­ing about it: you can put any char­ac­ters and dif­fer­ent kinds of love into this kind of rom-com machine and it will have the same impact because it makes you con­nect to the human­i­ty of the char­ac­ters. It’s why we need more trans peo­ple and peo­ple of colour, more queer sto­ries and inter­ra­cial cou­ples in the genre, because it’s actu­al­ly a real­ly pow­er­ful and hope­ful tool about connection.

She con­tin­ues, ​“Sure they’re fan­tasies, but I think they res­onate with all of us. Every human being wants to expe­ri­ence love, maybe not mar­riage, maybe not kids, maybe not monogamy, but we def­i­nite­ly want that thrill of being over­whelmed. I think it’s pri­mal and about get­ting out­side of your head and you leav­ing the day-to-day behind. That’s why I love rom-coms.”

Roman­tic Com­e­dy screens at Sheffield Doc/​Fest on 7 and 10 June. For more info head to sheff​docfest​.com