A Romantic Comedy In The Making
A few days ago, I was with my friend Beth at a restaurant (that’s not us pictured above) and we were engaged in a conversation about what we had been up to lately; last week, she began working at a clothing store located within a mall in Madison. She said that there was little patronage in the store and the owners were quite lax about what their employees did while working. Being a hobbyist filmmaker, that struck me as an opportunity for a filming location. “Why would we film in the store?” she asked. I’m a Hong Kong cinema fanatic, and Hong Kong filmmakers are well versed in making virtually any location interesting on film. I figured this would be a good opportunity to try my hand at a similar practice.
I didn’t have to craft a story around the store. When I was a senior in high school, I had an independent study period where my goal was simply to produce some short films and music videos. Initially, I had planned on filming two separate stories: Hostile Takeover and Love In Translation. After writing and revising a script for a month, we managed to (sort of) film Hostile Takeover, the production of which was plagued with problems. Since that turned out to be such a headache, I scrapped the idea of completing Love In Translation before the end of the school year. In Hollywood, that would be called placing it in “development hell.” Two years later and my vision for a romantic comedy still hasn’t been realized.
Yes, Love In Translation, if you hadn’t already guessed by the title, is a romantic comedy. It is a bit strange that I’m trying to make one, being that I don’t care much for rom-coms (even those made in Hong Kong). I think that the genre is somewhat destructive from a social psychological perspective; I’ve met many a girl who has crafted her idea of relationships around the falsehoods propagated by these popcorn flicks. Not only are most romantic comedies formulaic, but the formula they all derive from is absurdly unrealistic. Probably the most horrifying experience I’ve had with them is the time that I went with some coworkers to see He’s Just Not That Into You at the movie theater. The underlying theme of the movie seemed to be that men are all assholes; every time this was brought to light saliently within the film, the women in the theater (that is, everyone in the theater besides me and my friend Dave) applauded wildly. I sunk into my chair.
Another message of the film was that “if a guy likes you, he’ll make it happen.” And if a guy doesn’t like you, he’ll like you eventually anyway. Huh? That’s not quite how things work in real life. Of course, movies are supposed to be escapist adventures from mundane life, but they should at least make it interesting. The combination of rom-com prophecy and romance self-help books is even more deadly. Books that claim to help one find romance are operating under the fallacy that every member of a particular sex can, and is to be, courted in the exact same way. Obviously that’s not true, and that’s why no one in a relationship got there by acting on advice from the printed page. On that note, however, I recommend checking out The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene, which is an interesting read, along with his other books.
So, because of my contention with romantic comedies, I’m not looking to any as a source of inspiration for my own movie. Instead, I’m trying to model my script on one of my all-time favorite films, Chungking Express by Wong Kar-Wai (pictured above). In some ways, I’d like to draw parallels between Madison and Hong Kong, and between the Midnight Express food stall in that film with our own clothing store location. When I’m planning a movie, I also try to pick out specific songs (which may or may not make it into the final cut) that illustrate specific moods I want to convey at certain points. When I was making Hostile Takeover, I was listening to a lot of Italian disco and Depeche Mode; the film ended up being set in the ’80s, and had a certain dark but cool vibe to it (that’s what I was going for, at least). And so, here are some preliminary tracks that I’ve had in mind for Love In Translation. Let your imagination run wild with them:
- Turn My Head by LIVE.
- First Of The Gang To Die by Morrissey.
- Language of Love by Dan Fogelberg.
Credit for the screenshot goes to LoveHKFilm.com.
