Who wants to see the Notting Hill follow-up where it all falls apart? Not me – I’d rather recover my faith in the possibility of love
In 2003, I wanted to write a column about why Love Actually encapsulated everything bad about Britain, not just our culture, but our entire self-fashioning. The editor said no – we had to draw a line somewhere. I deferred, which was annoying, because I was completely right; everything that’s wrong with that film was visible from space.
And yet, give it its due, it caught the spirit of the age. It has nauseating class politics: the central love affair, between Hugh Grant’s prime minister and Martine McCutcheon’s tea lady, is a fairytale precisely because its emotional centre is lottery-winner gratitude, that a prince might fall for a peasant. And this, looking back, was merely the benevolent, festive face of a derision for the working class that, some years later, my colleague Owen Jones would describe in Chavs.
Continue reading… Who wants to see the Notting Hill follow-up where it all falls apart? Not me – I’d rather recover my faith in the possibility of loveIn 2003, I wanted to write a column about why Love Actually encapsulated everything bad about Britain, not just our culture, but our entire self-fashioning. The editor said no – we had to draw a line somewhere. I deferred, which was annoying, because I was completely right; everything that’s wrong with that film was visible from space.And yet, give it its due, it caught the spirit of the age. It has nauseating class politics: the central love affair, between Hugh Grant’s prime minister and Martine McCutcheon’s tea lady, is a fairytale precisely because its emotional centre is lottery-winner gratitude, that a prince might fall for a peasant. And this, looking back, was merely the benevolent, festive face of a derision for the working class that, some years later, my colleague Owen Jones would describe in Chavs. Continue reading… Romance films, Christmas, Love Actually, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Film, Culture, Life and style, UK news
