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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Article

Culture

Identity

Psychology

Work

7 February 2025

5 min read

Even the office can be a place for self-discovery

What the office makes us feel about ourselves

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A model of an office desk and shelves, at which a green plastic person sits leaning into the desk.

Igor Omilaev on Unsplash.

The realisation strikes me as I wrestle to fit my key into the lock on my office door: today I have no memory whatsoever of my journey into work. At my usual time I left the house and got in my car. I drove my usual route to my usual parking space and hopefully I stopped for all the red lights – but in truth I can’t remember any of them. Nor can I remember getting out of my car, locking my car (I hope I did that too) or walking from my parking space to this door, the lock of which is still failing to yield. This, I then realise, is because I am absent-mindedly trying to unlock it with my car key. Rolling my eyes, I reach into my pocket for the correct key… and it is not there.

Now I’m awake, glancing at my watch; 50 minutes until my first meeting of the day (online). This is enough to drive home again, but not enough to drive home, collect my key, and return to this frustrating door. By now I have established that both coat pockets are empty, so I drop to my knees and start to rummage through my bag.

It’s not a disaster if I do have to drive home, I can simply stay there and have a WFH day. I am fortunate, in my current job, to have the privilege of deciding this on a day-by-day basis. Many, I know, would love to work from home but do not have the option, but I prefer the office. The smell of black coffee, seagulls yakking on the roof. Doors open and close as colleagues come and go, keyboards tap, and on and off there is distant hum of student voices emanating from a classroom downstairs. In the hive of activity, I hum too, and I definitely get my work done more efficiently.

I’m interested to analyse this phenomenon through the lens of place attachment. There is a considerable body of research that investigates the way people feel about the spaces that they inhabit – that certain places become meaningful places to be in. Place attachment theorists explore how we can have relationships to places in much the same way that we have relationships to people – feeling a strong pull to return to the familiar, disliking change, and feeling ‘homesick’ for places where we have a strong emotional attachment. Of course, this is usually discussed in relation to the natural world, or to one’s childhood home, or ancestral lands… but why not of the office? Because the heart of place attachment is not really how we feel about places, but how places make us feel about ourselves.

Either for good or for bad, in the office one inhabits a certain sense of self – maybe not a different self to the one that we are at home – but at work, different aspects of that self are valued differently and are allowed to come to the fore. Perhaps I feel this especially because I am a working mum – it can be a relief to leave the home each day and come to inhabit a space where I am valued for more than my ability to know whether or not it’s PE today, or if there’s milk in the fridge. In the office, I can dwell in a version of myself that I enjoy – one that is paid to think and to write and to teach, a part of the university hum.

George Pitcher, in his recent article for Seen & Unseen, challenges managers to ask themselves why they are opposing more junior staff working from home. His discussion hints at this same phenomenon of places shaping identities, and Pitcher proposes that managers might resent junior staff working from home, at least in part, because they feel like their identity as a manager is compromised when they cannot sit in their glass-walled office, gazing out over the rows of worker bees, queen of all they survey. As Pitcher puts it, “…if staff aren’t in the office, then what’s the point of being a boss?”

The Bible too engages with the interplay between one’s sense of self and one’s sense of place. In the Old Testament, before the birth of Jesus, prophets and hymn writers spoke longingly of their homelands, and especially of the temple where they gathered to be assured of their identity as the people of God. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in strange land?” cries one hymnwriter, exiled far from home, while another writes of how he longs to dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of his life. With this sentiment I can empathise; just as I feel like more of a worker-bee when I am within the hive of the university, I feel I am much more of a Christian when belting out hymns among the Sunday throng than I am among my colleagues at a Monday morning meeting.

And yet the Bible issues a challenge to me here. Because after the Old Testament comes the New, written after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and largely after the destruction of the great “Second Temple” that Herod the Great had built in Jerusalem. With the temple gone, and the region subdued under Roman overlords, the New Testament writers make frequent allusions to Christian believers themselves being temples – temples of the Holy Spirit. This means that, as a Christian, I am urged to think of myself as a “place” of God’s presence in the world – and not just for my own sake but for the sake of others. I am not just part of the hum; I change the hum by being in it. The challenge is to gently bring the notes of my Sunday morning hymn to my Monday morning meeting.

A long time ago, when I was a little Brownie-Guide, we used to sing a campfire song called “Bees of Paradise.” It was very short and simple:

Bees of paradise, do the work of Jesus Christ

Do the work that no one can.

As a child, I never understood the words, although I enjoyed the pretty little tune that we sang it to, in the round. It comes back to me now, as I rummage in my bag for a key that I know I’m not going to find, and I return to my childhood habit of pondering the lyrics.