“A movie! That’s your problem: you don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.” If I could live in a film, I’d have to choose a Nora Ephron film. Her scripts are overflowing with romance – accomplished women having clever conversations with difficult men, and they’re all wearing some lovely knitwear. And New York! Cities in Ephron films – be it New York or Seattle – are filmed in such a way. It feels like coming home to city you’ve been away from for a long time.
My fondness for Ephron is genetic, I think. My mum named my older brother Jonah, after the kid from Sleepless in Seattle. I first watched it as a teenager, and was immediately taken in by Epron’s delightfully light touch. Everything about it seems brilliantly realistic, with a glossy top coat of romance, like looking at fairy lights without your glasses. Epron’s knack for translating old stories into new technology was second-to-none. Sleepless in Seattle was inspired by 1957’s An Affair to Remember (which is referenced throughout the film), itself a remake of 1939’s Love Affair. Despite this lineage of classic rom-coms, Sleepless doesn’t hesitate to play with the form. Its two romantic leads (Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks) don’t meet until the end of the fils and only share 2 minutes of screentime. That takes some nerve!
And talking about remakes: 1998’s You’ve Got Mail takes a classic love story of mistaken identity (Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner), and modernises it in such a way that you wouldn’t know that the story was in fact over 60 years old. This means moving it from Great Depression-era Budapest to 90s New York, and moving the correspondence to this new-fangled thing called “the Internet”. Ephron luxuriates in montages of pen pals of the digital age Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly (once again, Hanks and Ryan) crossing paths in New York, each unaware what they already mean to each other. I like how Joe Fox’s obsession with quoting The Godfather to the confusion of women he’s talking to (“The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom”, apparently) mirrors how the men in Sleepless are so completely perplexed about the women’s devotion to An Affair to Remember.
Devotion to pop culture is a big thing for Ephron and part of the impact of her films is in their soundtracking. Ephron utilises both jazz classics, and sweeping orchestral themes that call back to the romantic films of the 40s and 50s. Often she will focus on a particular singer in a film (be it Harry Nilsson or Harry Connick Jr.), to the ends that the arc of the film becomes entwined with this pre-existing music.
It would be remiss of me not to mention When Harry Met Sally… despite it not being directed by Ephron, but by Rob Reiner. It is perhaps the defining rom-com of the 20th century, taking a number of people at the prime of their careers to such brilliant ends. That said, it was only the third film that Ephron had been involved in, showing the strength of her writing.
I believe the core reason Ephron’s films have aged so well is because of the strength of her characters. Think about how many rom-coms have such boring cookie-cutter characters, and then compare that to Sally’s inability to order a sandwich in less than half an hour, or Frank’s typewriter obsession. Nora Ephron’s films provide such a education for any filmmaker on the importance of character and dialogue – something that the modern romcom would do well to remember.
Image Credits: The Movie DB
