Why ‘Notting Hill’ is the perfect movie to cure the blues

By Pune Media On Sep 24, 2024 25

(Credits: Far Out / Universal Pictures)

Tue 24 September 2024 9:00, UK

Many of my friends, whose sinews have been rotten with the frost of cynicism, often argue that romantic comedies, especially those starring Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts, break your heart further when you most need them to nurse your wounds. While that might be true for many or most romantic comedies starring these two ladies, Notting Hill, directed by Roger Michell, makes for a whole different ball game altogether.

It stars Hugh Grant as William Thacker, a roguishly handsome, soft British youth who was perhaps packed off to Eton very early and then sent to study philosophy and classics in Oxbridge for three more years. After which, he came right to the heart of Kensington to run a bookshop that specialises in travel literature (very demure, very mindful). While his shop is running losses and on the verge of being shut down, one fine day, Anna Scott (Julia Roberts), a leading female superstar from across the pond, just happens to walk into his shop.

While looking back upon the cinematic oeuvre of both Roberts and Grant, most people tend to dismiss Notting Hill on the grounds of the sheer ludicrous improbability of the love story. During an interview in 2014, Richard Curtis, who wrote the film, admitted to being inspired after daydreaming about an imaginary love affair between his best friend and Madonna.

But Notting Hill takes that stereotype of absolute improbability and fleshes out a story that grows on you. It does so by painting a vignette of two equally vulnerable and lost souls, whose excruciating beauty notwithstanding, creates an aching loneliness that makes your heart weep. No wonder Curtis had Tom Waits’ song ‘Downtown Train’ on loop while writing the script.

When Scott explains the inhuman hours her profession requires her to keep, you understand the sense of adventure and thrill she experiences when she walks with Thacker on a random night of the week. Strolling through the residential neighbourhoods of Kensington – a pertinent spot when it comes to the film’s real estate politics – you see her channel the lost innocence of a young girl who just wants to fall in love and be happy forever.

In a day and age where increased globalisation, digitisation of relationships, and commodification of friendships have become nothing short of a plague, watching Roberts’ character struggle alleviates some of your loneliness. It confirms, in the simplest of lines and the most fleeting of gestures, that even today, love is all about feeling seen and having an unknown weight lifted off your chest.

Hugh Grant is spectacular, too, in the role of a young man looking for love, only to have it walk right through his door. However, the most relatable and often ignored aspect of his character is that although this is precisely what he has been looking for all his life, he simply does not know what to do with it once it arrives before him. He is shy, and he struggles to make conversation. He fails to take control of the narrative that is rightfully his, and in the end, when a former flame shows up, he resigns himself to a self-determined fate.

Notting Hill is by no means a film that can be embraced with logic. At a time when all of London finds itself in the midst of a housing crisis, how Grant’s character was affording rent in a full-blown house in Notting Hill with just one roommate is something of genuine curiosity. But watching this film every time simply reaffirms the fact that even in the most far-fetched, star-crossed settings, there are people who are as real, as lost, and as monumentally foolish as us. And nothing in the world can ever replace the warm embrace of that recognition.