Friday Film Night...Notting Hill

This week at The Pink Heart Society's Friday Film Night, our very own Ally Blake is inducting Notting Hill into the Pink Heart Movie Hall of Fame...

The very last scene of this movie is my idea of heaven. Pure and simple. Sitting on that park bench with my husband, life, springtime and sunshine go on happily around us while we lie there in peace. Only change I’d make is that he would be pregnant and I’d be the one reading.

This is one movie that I love more every time I see it. The first time I saw it at the cinema I really liked it. I adored the characters. I adored the characters' friends. I adored the first meeting and the resolution. The ending made me cry.

But since then, I must have seen Notting Hill a hundred times at least. It’s one of those movies that whenever I flick channels to find it paying on cable, I simply stop, sit and stay until the very end.

THE HERO: Sweet floppy William Thacker.

What a name. It sounds like he has a lisp. He runs an unsuccessful bookstore which employs the daggiest guy on the planet. He can’t afford to buy more than a half cup of coffee he is so broke. He doesn’t want to speak to his mum on the phone and his housemate is mould personified. So why do we love him?

Firstly because Hugh Grant brings years of history of lovely British romance to this film. The hair, the crinkled shirts, the slightly foppish down-and-outer are characteristics of characters he has played in the past. He is the ultimate beta hero. The boy next door. Self-deprecating, cute, sweet, and charming. We all love a lovable underdog.

THE HEROINE: The world’s biggest movie star, Anna Scott.

How can we possibly relate to this woman? She is rich, popular, beautiful, and talented and seemingly has it all. She is actually tough to relate to for the first half of the film. Even though she sees something in our hero that she trusts, to add to the above mix of remote characteristics she is wary, guarded, quiet, and aloof. Which is fair enough too considering her lifestyle, and her past history with relationships. But the very fact that we are overwhelmed by her puts us very much into the hero’s shoes.

And then she goes as his date to his sister’s birthday party. What a scene. What a performance. With such beautiful subtlety, Julia Roberts infuses her Anna with warmth, humility, and self-consciousness. She gives her a sense of humour, cheekiness, and an innate kindness. So that when they kiss in the private garden after the whole “oopsie daisies” scene, this time you are ready for it. You love them, you feel for them. You feel their respective sadness and hesitation and hope and you want them to defeat the odds.

MOMENTS: Other moments I just adore are when she flips out in his bedroom yelling at him to calm down. Boy do I see myself in that shot! The first kiss is so awkward, nothing touches bar their lips. She leans in and he takes it, barely remembering to kiss her back. Almost anti-romantic. Priceless. When she is learning her lines while dressed in tracky-daks and sneakers and no make-up in his apartment, making jokes about his “large...shoes”. The blush that pinks her face during that scene is just about the best acting I have ever seen.

And I always get expectant chills during the scene where his friends kindly try to agree with him that rejecting her offer was the best thing to do, until his scruffy roommate Spike tells him what they have all been thinking, that he is in fact a ‘daft prick’. That moment the film turns on a beautiful hinge and just races towards the spectacular ending. An ending where we get not one, not two but a half-dozen happy endings. Nobody is left unloved!

COULD THIS BE A CATEGORY ROMANCE?

The whole movie star heroine and down and out hero is such a great twist I just have no idea! The focus on the romance, the building of the tension, the charming secondary characters, the focus on their growing love, so much about this film could make a great Harlequin Romance. And the fact that it actually ends in a wedding simply blows me away each and every time.

Not just a happily ever after, but a full blown wedding. And a baby. How many rom coms ever go so far as to say, 'Now this isn't just your typical happily ever after, these guys really do stay together forever'? Wow. Classic. Delightful. Brave for a realistic contemporary film. But it means that there is no doubt in my mind that life after the credits for them is going to be wonderful.

Warm and Fuzzy rating: 9 1/2.

Ally

http://www.allyblake.com

http://allyblake.blogspot.com

The heroine in Ally’s latest book WANTED: OUTBACK WIFE is from London, the home of the Valentine restaurant family whose stories have been told in the Brides of Bella Lucia miniseries.

While at the Portobello road markets in Notting Hill a couple of years back, she brushed shoulders with Ewan MacGregor!

Check out the behind the scenes section of her website for more!