Half-Watching Love Actually
I’ve only seen this once,
so I can’t quite remember,
but I think he’s the brother of her,
who’s married to him
who works with the two of them
and they have their do at his work
and he’s the best friend of him,
who’s old friends with her, and him,
and they were at his wedding,
and he’s in love with her but she’s
sleeping with him, and he’s directing them
but is also the best friend of him, who also
works for, or with, the other one,
who by coincidence lives next door to the one
who fancies the Prime Minister.
And who is also her brother.
It’s a small world, this loved-up London
of double-decker buses and East End galleries
riverside function rooms, festoon lights,
studio flats on West End mews, the Gherkin half-built,
where the dodgy end of Wandsworth is a million-pound terrace
and Heathrow seem remarkably relaxed about terrorists
so soon after 9/11.
It’s a small world, where there’s only one channel
and at most, four songs,
and where everyone’s miraculously connected to each other.
Looking back now, like through backwards binoculars,
it somehow seems to get smaller every year.
What’s this about then? Well, for the most part it’s self-explanatory, as I spent a portion of this evening eponymously half-watching the beloved/so-so/execrable (deleted as appropriate) Richard Curtis behemoth, Love Actually.
If you’ve not seen it, it’s mostly cheesy, repeatedly infuriating, regularly dodgy, occasionally heartbreaking, and thoroughly implausible. And of all these charges, perhaps that last one is most forgiveable – it’s a rom-com, after all, and a Christmas one at that. Surely you’re allowed a flight of fancy at this time of year, and to stretch the boundaries of narrative credibility to their absolute breaking point.
Love Actually is one of those films – i.e. any Richard Curtis film – which presents such an idealised version of life, and in particular London, that it’s actually a bit annoying. I know it’s twenty-odd years old now but there’s no way, even in them days, that Martine McCutcheon’s self-denigrated patch of South London wasn’t extremely lucrative real estate. It’s a bit like Notting Hill, in that respect – all these people seemingly in dead-end but very attractive jobs, struggling to earn fulfillment or actual money, but living in some of the most desirable postcodes in the capital, and apparently without a second thought as to how any of them are going to pay their (presumably extortionate) mortgages.
That’s a really minor thing to get wound up about, I know; and it doesn’t detract from the opening monologue about the Arrivals gate at Heathrow, which is actually quite nice. But there’s something sad about how much these attempts to celebrate the everyday, ordinary, extraordinary loves and lives are just so far removed from reality. It’s almost like a sense of the uncanny: This is Downing Street, this is London, this is England… but it’s not. Not quite. And not quite can be a hell of a long way sometime.
Anyway, I’m surely reading too much into it. Love Actually, Christmas classic or dewy, doe-eyed, misogynist trash, is a film about love. And this is a poem about watching Love Actually.
OK, half-watching. There was a lot going on.
I feel it in my fingers. Six days to go…
Owen x
The Poetry Advent Calendar 