Special Screenings 2019

Romantic Comedy

Elizabeth Sankey I 2019 I 79'

SYNOPSIS

As a teenager, Elizabeth Sankey was obsessed by romantic comedies. Looking back, she describes their influence on her as negative. She now realises that the genre is intrinsically conservative: the protagonists are white and heterosexual, the story is misogynistic and sentimental, the sex roles traditional.

BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Sankey

ELIZABETH SANKEY (UK) is an English writer, musician and actress. As a cultural commentator she has written for The Guardian, NME, Vice and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. With her band, Summer Camp, she has released three studio albums.

Multimedia

Critical text

When the British comedian Christie Bridget talks about the “fall off a horse” she is referring to that moment in which a woman becomes aware of the patriarchal society in which we live. From then on, it will be very difficult for her to take off her violet glasses to look around her. Well, we could say that Romantic Comedy is the director Elizabeth Sankey falling off that same horse and telling us in first person. If her ideals in childhood were shaped by romantic comedies, now her feminist awakening comes accompanied by the total decoding of this subgenre traditionally associated with the female audience. With a video essay approach, Sankey reviews numerous milestones of the “boy-meets-girl” to identify the repetition of plot patterns, but also the way in which the film language builds romance. A funny film with a critical spirit that buries some iconic titles, but also points to new forms of representation that are finally appropriate to our time. ANDREA MORÁN

Technical Sheet