FREE TIP, JUNE-JULY, 2010

WRESTLING WITH ROMANTIC DRAMA

Romance as a movie genre generally leaves me wanting to rush to nearest powder room and stick my finger down my throat. I went to see Letters to Juliet anyway (screenplay Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan) because a lot of people are. The audience surprised me when I found myself sharing the darkness with a crowd (and this was a matinee) consisting of everone from mostly female teenagers to a strong mix of male and female oldies. I actually checked my tickets to make sure I hadn’t gone into the wrong auditorium.

“Romantic Drama” is the genre of Letters to Juliet, and is one of the trickiest for a writer to craft. This film featured Vanessa Redgrave, who was my incentive for viewing it because Vanessa has perfected the hardest technique of acting, which is to seem not to act at all. She inherited and honed that skill with her parents Michael Redgrave and Rachael Kempson – equal masters of it – but is the only Redgrave child to have done so. Her late siblings, Lynn and Corin, were both strongly talented but Lynn’s style and build was robust, while Corin was only just beginning to prove himself a fine character actor when poor health struck him down.

The writers Rivera and Sullivan both have backgrounds in TV, a medium that hits its writers with a sackful of stringent disciplines that must be mastered. So you want to be a writer, go work in television for a couple of years. If TV doesn’t break you in the process, you will emerge with a technique capable of coping with any genre in any medium.

Letters to Juliet starts slowly, too slowly, and ignores my advice to writers to always give us something inside the first four minutes that will keep us watching. It almost lost me there. But the story began to unfold, still slowly.

Act One is too long. We got the message that Amanda Seyfried (another pretty young clone from the original Meg Ryan mould) and her fiancé were incompatible and we couldn’t wait for him to rack off alone to buy supplies for his New York restaurant. The Development begins when Sophie (Seyfried) stumbles on a courtyard in Verona, Italy, which is traditionally accepted as the site of Juliet’s balcony (as in Shakespeare’s play). Here star-crossed lovers, mostly female, leave letters on the wall addressed to Juliet asking her to solve their love problems. Given that Juliet’s own solutions ended in such calamity I don’t quite see the logic in this, but who am I to question Romantic Drama? I had already noted the location of the nearest powder room.

Anyway, the real movie starts when Sophie meets the group of women who volunteer to reply to all those letters, and she joins them. Each day the letters are cleared from the wall and taken to a nearby bistro for reply. When clearing the wall, Sophie finds a well concealed letter written more than fifty years ago by an English woman, and she resolves to try to trace her by replying to the fifty year old address.

Lo and behold the woman is at the same address and arrives in Verona with her handsome but anally retentive grandson. At last the movie grinds into gear and Redgrave steals every scene that she is in. Need I say more?

But it works! Why? Because it retains one vital element of romance: a sense of humour that allows it to send itself up. It anticipates possible ridicule by immediately making fun of the cliché that it has just shown us: the most obvious example being when, after a fruitless search for her long-lost Italian lover and almost on the point of giving up the search, Redgrave’s knight rides onto the screen as Franco Nero on a white horse. Really! It and other deliberate clichés work because the characters themselves have fun with them, and the writers have deliberately allowed them this leeway.

Conclusions re Romance:

Give us a surprise within the first four minutes, something that will hold our attention. Keep Act One short and get to the Development as soon as you can. Give your characters a sense of humour and you can get away with almost anything.

This month's tip ties in with my last Free Tip regarding writing

for the older woman.

The Older Woman, properly written, can be a show stealer