Review

Culture

Film & TV

Romance

12 February 2025

8 min read

Meet our top 5 rom coms for Valentine's Day

Love is the core of every truly good sweeping story.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A couple sit at a table in a diner talking intensely.

Castle Rocl.

1. The Apartment

Billy Wilder’s directorial tour-de-force is a timeless classic – proof for the sceptical that black-and-white films lose nothing in their monotone. Comedy legend Jack Lemmon plays C.C. "Bud" Baxter, an office worker who desperately seeks preferment. He impresses his superiors by allowing them to use his Upper West Side apartment to entertain their mistresses away from the gaze of their wives. He is also desperately seeking love, in the person of elevator operator Fran Kubelik. The only problem is that she is spoken for – she is the mistress of the big boss. Baxter juggles his ‘apartment schedule’, the disapproval of his neighbours, and his sorrow at seeing Fran slip away.

The script is the perfect combination of laughs and smiles. The performances are excellent, especially Lemmon’s balletic physical comedy (the spaghetti strained through a tennis racket scene stays with me like an old friend). The message is important: love hurts. The film resonates just as much now, in our world of HR and workplace boundaries, as it did then. Baxter, and ESPECIALLY Fran, are victims of those with power; except they don’t use violence or coercion to exert their control, they use the promise of acceptance, of love. Love is not a trifling emotion, as some of the most vapid frippery of Valentine’s Day may suggest, but the deepest motivation a human being can have – look at what Jesus does out of love. It is a dangerous thing when treated as instrumental and disposable, and can yield terrible and tragic results if abused. Thankfully, The Apartment ends on a note of hope and expectation…but it really has you on the edge-of-your-seat up until the end, and gives you and new appreciation for the sanctity of romance and love.

2. Notting Hill

We had to have a Richard Curtis pic – I’m a patriot after all! Naturally Four Weddings is excluded because of that one…appalling…unforgivable line…OF COURSE ANDIE MACDOWELL NOTICED THAT IT WAS RAINING!

Anyway. Notting Hill is such a lovely and gentle film. Hugh Grant is effortless as divorced and timid bookseller William Thacker. His life is comfortable yet a little empty, with his only real company being his unspeakable lodger Spike – Rhys Ifans in a career-defining role. His life is turned upside-down when Hollywood superstar Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) enters his shop, leaves, and then has him spill orange juice all down her front. Romance develops between the two but is continually stalled by the very different worlds they inhabit: Thacker lives a quiet life in Notting Hill, and Scott is a globe-trotting paparazzi-magnet who cannot seem to keep any aspect of her stage-managed life private. I won’t go into anymore of the plot, as you’ll know it even if you haven’t seen the film…it’s a National Treasure by now.

The wonderful message of this film, other than London property prices were ludicrously generous back in the day, is that love is a feeling and a force that can cross any boundaries. This is a modern-day quasi-Romeo and Juliet: two people from seemingly incompatible worlds allowing their love to break down barriers and overcome obstacles…except here we have a happy ending! Love is the greatest leveller this world knows (there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, man nor woman) – it is the equaliser of the human experience and fount of understanding, empathy, and mercy.

3. Knocked Up

I’m afraid we move to less elevated fare and instead begin the descent into puerility. One can expect nothing less from director Judd Apatow, who has made his name by combining the compulsory schmaltz of a rom com with the sweary gross-out humour of our less-civilised age. Nevertheless, this film has real merit.

Katherine Heigl is Allison Scott, an ambitious reporter for an entertainment news channel. She goes out to celebrate her well-earned promotion, has a little (or a lot-tle) too much to drink, and ends up having a one-night stand with aspiring internet celebrity pornographer Ben Stone (Seth Rogen). Their dalliance leads to the inevitable – pregnancy. Allison finds herself in the invidious position of having dinner with Ben, to inform him of her maternal state, only to realise that she finds him repulsive. He is everything she isn’t: she is ambitious, organised, and stable, while his greatest achievement is a collection of bongs and a potential website detailing moments of on-screen nudity. They are chalk-and-cheese…and yet they both decide to try and make their lives compatible to raise their child together.

It's not a clever film, and the laughs are all guilty guffaws at over-the-top toilet humour, but it does have heart. It is the story of two people who don’t find love in a glance across a crowded room, or through a shared interest, but through a shared struggle. It is the story of two people who learn through difficulty, pain, and self-sacrifice what it means to live for another; even if that other person is yet to be born. At the centre of this film – after digging through tranches of (apparently hilarious) excrement – is the message that love is not instantaneous or easy, but something that is worked towards and maintained through giving up one’s own wants and pleasures for the good of another. I wonder which two-thousand-year-old story embodies this theme?

4. The Princess Bride

The phrase ‘cult-classic’ might as well have been invented to describe this film. It is a mad-cap tale incorporating piracy, palace intrigue, and a giant. I…I…I can’t even try to give a plot synopsis. It goes all over the place, as if it where story-boarded by an over-imaginative seven-year-old who’s been given a surfeit of sugar (sorry William Goldman). The humour, essential for the ‘com’ to the ‘rom’, is more-often-than-not accidental, but humour there is in spades. Its silly, and its sweet, and its certifiable…but it works.

What puts The Princess Bride in my Top 5 is the epic sweep of the film. I’m pretty certain it didn’t intend to be a rom com, but I count it as one, and so it is the only rom com that manages to also be a mythopoetic tale. Perhaps Shrek is in the same league…but I can’t forgive the sequels and the overuse of Eddie Murphy. The Princess Bride is a wonderful reminder that love is a great, epic, poetic, mythic, legendary force in the world. Love has started and ended wars, it has rewritten the tablet of history over and over again, and is not a ‘story’ that can be confined to a ‘meet-cute’ between two unreasonably attractive people in a New York coffee shop – it is the very language of reality, and so is the lens through which we must view not only ourselves and our immediate loved ones, but the whole of the universe and the whole of human history. Love is the core of every truly good sweeping story – especially that story that begins with the loving creation of heaven and earth, their salvation in the love of the Cross, and their reconstitution as the New Heaven and New Earth where love of God is the primary vocation of all.

AAAAAND…it starts and ends with Peter Falk as a grandfather lovingly telling this story to his sick grandson…the heart melts…

5. When Harry Met Sally…

In the kingdom of rom-coms Nora Ephron is the Empress to whom all others bow, and this is her greatest conquest! When Harry Met Sally… is epic in its sweep, but in a very different way to The Princess Bride. It is epic in that it is a love story that takes over a decade to play out. Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) meet by chance in 1977. Serendipity is at work: he is dating her best friend, and so, as a matter of convenience, the two share a car to journey from Chicago to New York. As in many rom coms their personalities couldn’t be more different, and although they share chemistry, Sally chafes at Harry’s confident assertion that men and women cannot be friends. The journey ends unhappily, and the two have no intention of every meeting again.

Five years pass and the pair find themselves on the same flight. Serendipity strike again when Harry learns that Sally is dating his neighbour. The chemistry is sparking reactions, but when Harry suggests they become friends Sally declines, citing his previous assertion about male/female friendship.

Another five years pass – and so a serendipitous meeting is in the diary – and there is a chance meeting in a bookshop. Both are now single and have faced the sting of love lost. They strike up a friendship. The friendship matures and deepens, and those around them can see that they are falling in love, yet their determination to be friends leads them to have romantic attachments to other people. This falls apart after a night of high-emotion and comfort turns into amorous passion. Their friendship is seemingly ruined, and both miserably start to live like without the other.

UNTIL…

On New Year’s Eve 1988 Harry realises that he cannot be whole or happy without Sally and runs to find her at a party, to declare his love for her in the greatest speech in rom-com history! The cinema cheers! What makes When Harry Met Sally… dear to my heart is that seeming serendipity I keep mentioning, because it teaches us a vital lesson about love. There is no true chance, no true serendipity in love. Love is the very glue that binds all creation together. The Scriptures, the great mystics of the faith, the very person of Jesus Christ, teach us that God is love and that this love is all and is in all. There is no coincidence in love – love really is what makes the world go round. In the end, just as Harry and Sally seemed destined to be together, we are destined to be united with God in love.

I started this list a little sceptical and burnt-out with the romance of Valentine’s Day. Having reengaged with these five films I am revivified and reconverted to the great name of love. Love drives us, heals us, and ultimately embraces us in eternity. What a wonderful legacy for St Valentine to have.

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Explainer

Christmas culture

Culture

Middle East

22 December 2024

7 min read

The mysterious Magi: outsiders, outlandish, Uyghur?

Many claimed the Wise Men, wherever the story was heard.

Benjamin Sharkey

Benjamin is a DPhil student in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He is researching the experience of Christian communities in medieval Central Asia.

Silhouttes of three wise men approach the Virgin and Child, painted on stone.

The Magi, Catacombs of Priscilla, 250AD.

Public Domain.

Our nativities are full of familiar figures. Mary and the angel Gabriel, Joseph and the landlords of Bethlehem (of varying hospitality), the shepherds above the town and the heavenly host. Finally, there come the three gift-bearers. While familiar, these perhaps remain the most mysterious guests at the manger. Are they three kings? ‘Wise men’? ‘Magi’? What indeed is a ‘magi’?

Most of the features of our nativity come from the first two chapters of Luke’s gospel, but the magi (along with their counterpart, King Herod) are the primary contribution of Matthew’s gospel, appearing in the second chapter. The word used in Matthew is magi (magoi), a term that was often used for the priests of the Persian religion, today known as Zoroastrianism but in Antiquity known to outsiders simply as ‘magianism’. However, in the gospel it is perhaps intended to carry less specific meaning, instead indicating more broadly those learned in esoteric knowledge, hence our common translation of ‘wise men’. We might be reminded of the class of experts who Nebuchadnezzar summoned to help interpret his dreams, over whom he promoted Daniel to be chief. These were people both knowledgeable and practiced in observing the patterns of nature, experts in hidden knowledge and science, propitiating and interpreting the divine, ‘magic’, alchemy, and astrology. Indeed, this is where we get our word magic from. It is someone of this kind who is intended by the other use of ‘magic’ in the New Testament, when in the book of Acts Simon the ‘magi’, having believed and been baptised, asks to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from Peter and John. Whichever definition is intended in Matthew, these are unexpected guests in Bethlehem.

We learn very little further about them besides that they came from ‘the east’, to which they return as mysteriously as they arrived. Might they perhaps have been from one of the neighbouring eastern states that lay just outside the borders of the Roman Empire, such as Osroene, Adiabene, or Armenia, or even from the great Persian Parthian Empire? Parthia and its provinces were named specifically in the Book of Acts, but Matthew’s is a far more ambiguous reference. Indeed, many scholars would question the historicity of the episode of the magi’s visit, seemingly unrooted in time and place in contrast to the historical and geographical grounding of the rest of the gospels, and so clearly serving as a fulfilment of prophecy about the messiah. The old song of Psalm 72 says: “May the kings of Tarshish and of distant shores bring tribute to him. May the kings of Sheba and Seba present him gifts. May all kings bow down to him and all nations serve him.” Elswhere the book of Isaiah records: “The nations will come to your light, Kings to the brightness of your dawn… young camels will come bearing gold and incense, proclaiming the praise of the Lord.” When you see the gift-bearing magi represented as camel-riding kings on your Christmas cards, they are being shown as the fulfilment of these prophecies.

Christians in medieval Europe were dimly aware of just how widespread Christianity was, and they represented this in their stories about the magi.

What is crucially important in their role as prophecy-fulfillers is that they are gentiles. Indeed, they are the first of those outside of God’s chosen people to recognise the Messiah. While Luke shows Jesus announced to the poor and humble among the Jews, rather than the priestly or royal, Matthew shows him recognised by the gentiles, the first trickle of a mighty torrent prophesied throughout the Old Testament: “All the nations you have made will come and worship before you, Lord,” sings the Psalmist. “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established… and all nations will stream to it,” records Isaiah once more. This is echoed also in Micah, the book quoted in Matthew by the chief priests to the magi: “The mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established, and many nations will come and say – let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.” These were outlandish claims and the magi represented the outlandish start of their fulfilment.

Nevertheless, the magi in Matthew don’t float entirely untethered from historical reality, as they act out a story within the solidly historical setting of Herod’s final paranoia. His anxiety about the title ‘king of the Jews’, and his desperate massacre of the innocents both fit with what we know of his last days. For Herod, an Idumean (or Edomite), his questionable Jewishness had been a source of anxiety throughout his life, and he had become deeply unpopular by the end of his life, perceived as far too close to the Romans. Some scholars have suggested that Herod would have found fewer than a dozen infant boys around Bethlehem, as such it is unsurprising that his order is otherwise absent from the historical record. One of the few authors to cover this place and time was Josephus but writing almost a century later, he is much hazier on this period. He does, however, note that at this time Herod’s paranoia had driven him to kill three of his own sons, including his heir, historically much more significant and shocking. Josephus also claims, that on his deathbed Herod gave orders to have all the principal men of the entire Jewish nation killed when he died, to increase the mourning of the people, orders which were not carried out.

That one day people of all nations and tongues would come to worship the God of Israel is one of the more outlandish claims recorded in the Old Testament. Even for early Christians, who were more actively seeking its fulfilment, it must have remained somewhat unimaginable, given they were still a minority in a corner of the Roman and Persian Empires who knew very well that human societies stretched on beyond their known horizons. By the Middle Ages, it was appearing a lot less outlandish. There were now Christians as far flung as Iceland, China, and Ethiopia. Christians in medieval Europe were dimly aware of just how widespread Christianity was, and they represented this in their stories about the magi. They imagined them as three kings (echoing prophecy and expounding scripture) from the three ‘petals’ of the world which connected at Jerusalem, representatives of the many gentile nations who would embrace the gospel. One for Europe, one for Asia, one for Africa; even in medieval Europe the church was understood as encompassing all three, and the magi were the first indication that it would.

In Asia, ‘east’ of Jerusalem, the magi assumed different significance. Whether in Persia or China, claims were frequently made that the magi had come from their own place or people. Among the Christians of Mesopotamia (covering present-day Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey), where Christianity had first arrived under the Parthian Empire, various legends were written about them in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic). Here they often numbered twelve and were claimed as the founders of various churches and villages. Further east, and later, in the thirteenth century, an Armenian Christian lord, Smbat Sparapet, recorded in a letter that, while travelling across the Mongol Empire and visiting Christians in Central Asia and China, he had noticed they all decorated their churches with images of the magi. He recorded that the magi were believed to have originally come from China, from the region corresponding to present-day Gansu province. His brother, the Armenian king of Cilicia (south-east Turkey), who later made the same journey alternatively recorded that the magi had rather come from among the Uyghurs.

The Turfan Oasis, lying to the north of the great Taklamakan desert in today’s Xinjiang province in China, also known as the Uyghur Autonomous Region, was home to a community of Uyghur Christians between at least the eighth to fourteenth centuries. One of the few surviving indications of their presence is a large collection of fragmentary manuscripts, preserved by the dry desert conditions. Among these is a unique legend concerning the magi, originally written in Syriac, but here translated into Uyghur. It preserves the account from Matthew but with some additions. For instance, the identification of the magi with the Zoroastrian priesthood is made explicit, probably owing to the original Syriac authors’ own familiarity living among the ‘magians’ of Mesopotamia. Most striking of all though is the word choice of the Uyghur translator. Approaching the infant Jesus, the magi hail him as ‘Khan Messiah, the son of Tengri.’ The magi’s royal gift of gold recognises Jesus as ‘khan’, a straightforward translation of ‘lord’ but one which carries local cultural resonance. Tengri, however, was the high God of the Uyghurs and Mongols. He was the creator, present everywhere, but associated particularly with the heavens. To see Tengri in Jesus was to see the mighty God who forged their own sky and steppe come to earth as infant and man.

The popular legend that the magi had come from among the Uyghurs, which perhaps motivated this translation, connected their immediate reality to the distant settings of the gospel stories. Like the legends of the medieval west, this too served to communicate the truth that in the recognition of Jesus by the first gentiles, the magi, could be seen the start of the gospel’s journey to all gentiles, all nations, tongues, and petals.