Notting Hill, the saccharine Richard Curtis film starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, is one of the highest grossing rom-coms of all time. For those of us hurtling towards middle-age, the BAFTA-winning film is something of a classic. Now, to celebrate its 20th birthday, Netflix has this week re-released the film on its platform.
In recent years, art, culture and entertainment has come under increasing scrutiny. Some of it overdue: numerous entertainers have been exposed for historic sex offences, and their work and shows boycotted as a result. Watching re-runs of Top of the Pops would rightly make you shiver. But other critiques have been more tiresome, such as the social media pile-on after Friends was re-released on Netflix. New viewers saw sexist, homophobic and transphobic storylines in the cult Nineties TV show.
What, then, will a woke 2019 audience make of Notting Hill? I felt a twinge of nervousness sitting down to re-watch the Curtis classic two decades on. But on identity politics I needn’t have worried. As it turns out, it was a film ahead of its time.
Notting Hill, despite being lauded as the archetypal rom-com and thus theoretically a ‘chick flick’, has a storyline that hadn’t been explored in mainstream cinema before. It inverts the standard female-male power dynamic.
Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) is the person with the power in the relationship, with William (Hugh Grant) playing what would have been, up until that point, the more stereotypical female role of having to hang on the man’s every whim. Anna decides when and if the relationship runs or stops; throughout the film she comes in and out of William’s life whenever she pleases. She can get to him, but he can’t get to her.
True, the power structure is somewhat reversed at the very end, with Anna pledging to stay in London to be with William, rather than him having to move across the Atlantic to be with her. But ultimately, she remains the power broker in the relationship. In the penultimate scene the couple are seen at a film premiere, her career clearly still going strong, while William looks shaky at the red-carpet event, holding onto Anna’s arm for dear life. She is the boss from the moment they meet until the final shot.
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