Romantic Comedy

As a teenager, Elizabeth Sankey was obsessed by romantic comedies. The many romcoms she saw, like My Best Friend's Wedding, Runaway Bride and When Harry Met Sally, coloured her view of love and relationships. 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.

Using a large number of film clips, Sankey analyses the genre together with other aficionados. Why did it become so conservative? Why are career women portrayed negatively? Why are the few homosexual characters so stereotypical? Where are the lesbian or transgender people? Where are the protagonists who don’t come from the middle classes? While Sankey sees how unrealistic everything is, she also thoroughly enjoys the genre. Why is this? The excerpts and her voice-over analyses are juxtaposed with songs by Summer Camp, a band in which Sankey performs along with her husband, composer Jeremy Warmsley.