The big-screen romantic comedy is unfashionable enough these days that it tends to come dressed up in at least one of two ways: with a quasi-absurd high concept (see this summer’s “One Night Only”) or draped in enough ironic quote marks to make clear that the filmmakers are rolling their eyes right along with you. At first glance, “Finding Emily” threatens to do just that. Its heroine, after all, is a college student writing a literal dissertation on the real-world impracticality of romantic attachment; she enters the film quoting Freud (“Love is a state of temporary psychosis”) and calling out manic pixie dreamgirl tropes. Happily, however, director Alicia MacDonald‘s film is both smarter and sweeter than that: smart enough to identify the GenZ sexual politics that make a fool’s errand of the supposedly grand gestures that are the romcom’s stock-in-trade, and sweet enough to know when those gestures work anyway.
It’s significant that “Finding Emily” comes from the stable of Working Title Films, the production company that practically patented the British romcom decades ago with the Richard Curtis-scripted run of “Four Weddings and Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually” and the “Bridget Jones” series. Their DNA is traceable in this film’s wry comedy of embarrassment, but there’s a palpable generational shift in its tone and presentation: MacDonald, making a sparky feature debut, and screenwriter Rachel Hirons run all manner of boy-meets-girl clichés through a Zoomer worldview of gender constructs and relationship dynamics, without the resulting film ever feeling strained or focus-grouped in its youthful outlook. And when it does border on cheese, it owns that: “True freedom in this life is knowing you’re cringe and doing it anyway,” observes one character, quite wisely.
