The Rebirth of Romantic Comedy

The romantic comedy is dead. We all agree on that, right? Twenty-five years after Harry met Sally, the genre they established—in its contemporary Hollywood form—is moribund. Every few months, someone eagerly analyzes the evolution and apparent decline of the genre.

As evidence, he or she points to waning box office returns for the kind of film that used to draw people in droves—as Runaway Bride ($152 million), 50 First Dates ($120 million), and Sweet Home Alabama ($127 million), to take just a few unremarkable examples from roughly 10 to 15 years ago, each did. The reason today’s crop of similarly tailored rom-coms don’t earn like they used to, they say, is that the big stars of the era (Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, Reese Witherspoon) have aged out of the single-woman-looking-for-love category, and the movies have gotten plain awful.

But by avoiding rom-com clichés, The One I Love delivers the sharp laughs and emotional oomph that rom-coms were always supposed to—that Harry and Sally did—without adhering to a formula at all. Instead, the film goes deep in its deconstruction of the genre with a premise that leans on tropes from other kinds of films—in addition to the kind that it interestingly and unconventionally is.

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