Modern Love Stories in a Modern Context: Contemporary Romance Cinema
In the realm of cinema, love stories have evolved significantly over the years. Two distinct approaches can be observed - the traditional romantic narratives of classical cinema and the postmodern perspectives that challenge these conventions.
Postmodern films, such as Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy, emphasise fragmentation, ambiguity, and contradiction over coherence and idealization. These movies often use meta-reference and self-reflexivity to highlight the constructed nature of romantic narratives, employ intertextuality and pastiche to parody or remix traditional love stories, and portray love in conjunction with themes of alienation, identity crisis, and social dislocation.
The Before Trilogy, consisting of Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and an unspecified third film, is a prime example of this approach. The dialogue in Before Sunrise is structured in a postmodern manner, favouring the characters' feelings as individuals over objective truth. Nostalgia is key to postmodern love, as depicted in Before Sunset, acting as a bridge between the first and third film in the trilogy, and it embodies the concept that the past shapes the present and dictates the future.
Linklater's Before Trilogy also creates a sense of postmodern self-awareness unique to art itself by referencing his own work within the films.
Contrasting the Before Trilogy, the Chick Flick subgenre, popular in the 80s, presents female protagonists who were often flawed, awkward, and unlikeable, but their flaws were always in the name of love. Movies like Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Dirty Dancing (1987), and Moonstruck (1987) were part of this subgenre, marketed towards modern women who yearned for a romantic connection.
However, postmodernist perspectives within the romance genre have been brewing for decades, particularly in the independent scene, but they became more prominent as the digital age seeped into modern dating standards. Conversations blossom over phones rather than in person, and there's less mystery surrounding potential partners as people become easier to find in the digital age.
Films like 500 Days of Summer (2009) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) embody this shift. In 500 Days of Summer, elements of its structure parody Hollywood rom coms, such as the 'Expectations vs. Reality' scene. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes place in the aftermath of a relationship, where one character has erased their past with the other through a fictional memory procedure, embodying the second characteristic of postmodernist romance: cynical attitudes to love often result in fragmented storytelling.
Thus, postmodernism redefines love on screen as a complex, unstable, and often elusive phenomenon reflective of contemporary cultural conditions. Whether it's the romantic encounters in Vienna, the digital age's influence on relationships, or the exploration of love's paradoxes, cinema continues to mirror our evolving understanding of love.
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