Love Actually

The so-called romantic comedies have always had a secure public. The drill is almost always the same: two characters who meet by chance and then discover to be in love.

Romantic comedies tend to have as characters romantic, beautiful women and  funny and sensitive men who find themselves feeling something new.

The case of "Love Actually" is a bit different. To start with, there is a story which is not 1 but 10, 10 lives that intersect and in which love plays an important role. Also, not all of them are about falling in love in the traditional sense: so there's the recently widowed man, a rock star in a declining career that manages to produce an awful but successful Christmas song just to make money, the married man tempted to commit an infidelity...

Some are downright funny and are solely intended to make us smile: like the Englishman who is convinced that in the U.S. he will be appreciated by women, so he leaves everything to fulfill, one after another, all the sexual fantasies clichés of any teen.

Others, such as the one of Hugh Grant starring as the British Prime Minister, fully meet the assumptions of a typical romantic comedy story. Hugh Grant plays this man who is a little immature but good-hearted,  with  a “Want's me” kind of face, who cannot accept what he is feeling for his catering manager. His meeting with the President of the United States is quite cartoonish and very funny.

Among the smiles produced by the awkward situations or misunderstandings experienced by certain characters, as in the case of the couple who does not speak the same language, other stories emerge.

And thene there is the one couple that, while acting in a porn movie, discover that love can come from the words that can be exchanged while performing in a pale and empty sex scene. And the one couple that feel doomed to an impossible love that move us with their helplessness and despair.

The pain of losing a loved one appears appear as yet another variant of love. All these variants, so strong and special, we have all somehow experienced. 

There is the feeling that love is everywhere producing happiness but also tears, anxiety and helplessness.    No matter how, it is hard to be indifferent to.

Director: Richard Curtis

Writer: Richard Curtis

Stars: Hugh Grant, Martine McCutcheon and Liam Neeson