It’s the age-old story: you’re at the opera with the one-handed wolfish brother of your fiancé, whom you’ve just had sex with while your partner visits his dying mother in Sicily, and you bump into your father watching La Bohème with his blusher-down-the-cleavage mistress. Because – and this is where the writer and director of the 1987 box office smash Moonstruck got it so right – there is nothing quite so romantic as a dysfunctional family.
While the button mushroom cuteness of someone like Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks can sell a lot of popcorn, for me, the greatest love of all is watching the shouting, irascible, beak-nosed, snaggle-toothed, immigrant, blended family antics of people that don’t necessarily look like movie stars. I want relationships that I can believe in, and in my case, that means people who are already divorced, or widowed, cheating fathers and negligent mothers. Cher is the queen of this, of course. I have never seen anyone quite so beautiful as Cher in Moonstruck, both before and after she dyes her few grey hairs and starts walking around in a pair of red fabric stilettos and a really good wool coat. Apart from, perhaps, Olympia Dukakis, who plays her mother.
Moonstruck is a strange and brilliant film; like an arthouse movie, but with the marketing of a traditional rom-com. The premise, such as it is, is that an enormous full moon has bewitched New York, or more specifically Brooklyn, turning everyone lustful and romantic. Middle-aged shop owners become giddy hound dogs, giggling under their displays of pendulous salamis. Cher’s mother, after guessing her husband’s infidelity, has a sizzlingly romantic meal in a tiny restaurant with a stranger (played, with all his twinkling Irish charm, by John Mahoney – aka the dad from Frasier). And at the centre of it all, the Hollywood frumpy (ie dazzlingly beautiful) Italian-American accountant Loretta Castorini falls hopelessly in love with the brother of her fiancé, with his sweat-soaked vest, wooden hand, gruff manner and love of opera.
Cher did it all over again a few years later in Mermaids, which came out in 1990, and follows the unlikely love story of a tall, wild-haired, single mother – who moves house every few months, sleeps with the wrong guys and is locked in a fierce battle with her prudish oldest daughter – and a short, round shoe salesman played by Bob Hoskins. As Mrs Flax, Cher is once again sensationally beautiful in early ’60s polka dots, huge hair and high-waisted jeans, but her romance with Louis “Lou” Landsky is made all the more romantic and more believable by the fact that he is stout, she is promiscuous, her family is unconventional and almost every single character (apart from baby Christina Ricci) is emotionally damaged in some way. The horny pairing of two unlikely-looking grown-ups with emotional baggage and caring responsibilities? Now that’s a love story I can get behind!
Of course, the romance in a rom-com doesn’t always have to be between lovers. In Wes Anderson’s beautiful 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited, the romance takes place between three generously nosed brothers as they career through India, trying to find their mother after their dad’s funeral. As someone with Indian family, I cannot tell you how much I loved the combination of tall men, The Kinks soundtrack, rattling trains, dusty landscapes, wild cities and awkward, fraternal affection when The Darjeeling Limited came out. I love that Anjelica Huston – another woman so luminous on screen it’s hard to look at anything else – is a flawed and erring mother. When we find her in an ashram, she is grey-haired, simply dressed, with kohl around her eyes and a higher purpose on her mind. She has abandoned her children and taken on a classroom. She is awful and she is brilliant.
Why is there such romance to a dysfunctional family? Why are we so drawn to the passions and pains of people whose families behave badly? Or have had previous relationships? Or are ill or fight or dress weirdly or have no filter? Perhaps because people with complicated, unconventional and unresolved families feel things. We feel them deeply and are guided by those feelings – are blinded by them, wrestle with them and are swept up in them. We understand the limitations of relationships and yet run into them anyway. We are more interesting to watch. We have peeled off the layers of repression and passivity that seem innate to so many Hollywood heroines. We know that to love someone is an act of madness as well as faith.
From The Family Stone to Pride And Prejudice, Silver Linings Playbook to Heartburn, romantic comedies that can tiptoe along the line between family drama and love story are a step above the standard boy-meets-girl trope. They give pleasure of a different measure. So, forget boy meets girl. Give me boy meets girl, girl’s mother is a lusty neurotic, boy is living with his elderly father, girl enlists the help of her damaged siblings, boy’s father is having an affair with his nurse, girl is getting divorced, boy has a child by a previous relationship, and they all wear amazing clothes, have huge hair and never get a nose job. That’s the love for me.
