No Time To Die
James Bond is indestructible, right? He (nearly) always ends up with the girl, right? Wrong!
I have been using for some time the term anti-romantic comedy. Some examples of this (or perhaps some of them should be called anti-romantic dramas) are Casablanca, La La Land, (500) Days of Summer, Annie Hall, Play It Again, Sam, Celeste and Jesse Forever, Her, My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Way We Were, and Manhattan. I mentioned this category and this list in a previous thread. I don’t have a better name for it. As someone mentions above, The Last American Virgin is a really hardcore example.
Road Trip was a movie about some college guys that race across the country to intercept a sex tape accidentally sent to one guy’s girlfriend, who is going to another university.
In the end, they manage to get to her, but rather than a big romantic reunion the couple decide that they are better as friends than try to maintain a long distance relationship, and they amicably break up.
(The movie involved Tom Green, who became famous for his gross and weird antics, but it was surprisingly good, and subverted many tropes. Another I thought of involved the guys flying their car over a ravine. They manage to make the jump, but once their car lands it is disabled by the attempt. Another involves the dorky guy hooking up with a girl, except she is a very large black woman: they manage to make it into a sweet encounter)
I’m not sure if Rogue One could be considered anti-trope. It went against the usual Star Wars tropes.
Psycho was shockingly anti-trope, basically switching horses mid-stream. People are familiar with it now, but it had not been done before then.
Gaslight, for its time, had an unusual take on romance, when Paula says “So from the beginning there would have been nothing.” I won’t be more specific, so it isn’t a spoiler for an 80-yr-old movie.
But sometimes it’s a matter of context-- even the guy slipping on the banana peel was fresh once (it was a twist on an “eating a banana” gag)-- when a movie was a trope-setter, sometimes it was a trope-breaker, but if it was made in 1925, it is probably old hat to us.
The Third Man is a fantastic movie. A lot of cultural highlights are now somewhat neglected, but this is a sign of the times when there is too much information. The movie was very highly regarded in its day.
The anti-trope question has an uncertain Heisenberg quality because well known examples tend to become admired and the sources of new tropes. Arguably the best time to define these movies is at the time of their release and not decades later.
Given such a definition, Pulp Fiction was anti-trope despite being essentially a vast collection of tropes. Any French New Wave stuff might qualify. Offbeat movies like Delicatessen, Repo Man, Local Hero or Blade Runner might qualify even though they became tropes.
I remember arguing at a university party years ago about romantic movies. A friend argued American movies essentially always ended with the guy getting the girl, European movies were all about the consequences of relationships ignored in American films (starting where American films end), and Asian movies placed more emphasis on setting and atmosphere than any romantic relationship. Obviously, that is not always or even usually true, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to that theory. If nothing else, it was more memorable than most social chitchat.
I love that the Zucker brothers paired up Brecklin Meyer and Amy Smart again in Rat Race.
If you say “Hollywood” instead of “American” movies, and take the qualified “always” to mean “usually,” or even “predictably,” but not quite “always,” I would agree, but there are plenty of exceptions, and independent films are often not even about romance.
Before Sunrise
Stranger than Paradise
Eight Men Out
Do the Right Thing
Were independent films;
12 Angry Men
The Miracle Worker
Were Hollywood films.
You can blame the romantic comedy/Happily Ever After on Jane Austen, or, better yet, Shakespeare.
I write romance. A romance is a very specific kind of story. Lovers meet, attraction, first kiss, lovers separate, proof of love, declaration of love, happily ever after. Rom-coms follow this formula. It gets more complex than that, especially when you start adding in romance tropes, but that’s the gist. In order for a film to subvert the romance trope, it would have to include most of those things, so-as to be recognized as a romance, in order to subvert the trope. But if you structure a film as a romance and it “subverts the HEA trope” you’re gonna have a lot of pissed off people, including me. It would be like having a big-budget action movie where the villain isn’t defeated at the end. Not impossible, but you risk alienating your core audience.
When you begin a story you are establishing a contract with the viewer. “This is the kind of story I am going to tell you now.” The more you deliver on that promise, the happier your viewer will be. If you promise one kind of story and deliver something different, you do so at your own peril.
There are a lot of stories that deal with romantic love that are not romances. Casablanca is a good example. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. These rely less heavily on tropes. They can go lots of different directions. They are not the romance genre. The romance genre is a specific thing. You can even have a love story where they end up together but it’s not a romance because it does not contain all of the elements described in P1 above.
And before you get all “romances are so formulaic” I must say that all genre stories are formulaic. They’ve all got rules, and types of scenes that viewers expect to see.
Do some enterprising folks occasionally break those rules? Yes.
But a love story does not de facto break those rules just because there is no HEA. Love stories do not require a HEA.
In those pre-CGI days I thought that was some fantastic stunt-flying.
There are many exceptions, possibly more than examples, but my friend took an “extreme” position for the purpose of generating debate and discussion. I still feel she was more right than wrong. I don’t know or can’t remember why she said American and not Hollywood. Possibly to be consistent with the other continents mentioned, and rather than talk specifically about, say, France or Bollywood (at a time when the “Three Colours” trilogy was popular).
Things like Atomic Café or Koyaaniskatsi are pretty unique, or were on release. Probably anti-trope.