7 DAYS - London Film Festival 2021

Under pressure from both their parents to find a suitable partner and get married, Rita and Ravi (Geraldine Viswanathan and Karan Soni) match on an Indian dating app and agree to meet. The first problem they've got is that it's March 2020 and there's a pandemic flaring up, so a socially distanced picnic in the park only increases the awkwardness of their first meeting, with the pair finding they have little in common apart from the desire to keep their parents happy. When the government's "Shelter in Place" lockdown order forces Ravi to stay at Rita's apartment, he finds that she wasn't being completely truthful about her lifestyle, nor her status as single.

As romantic comedy meet cutes go, a real life pandemic is certainly a bold one to choose, especially when we're not quite out the end of it yet. Rom-coms have tried similar scenarios before, forcing supposedly mismatched odd couples to live together and learn an important lesson along the way, but this is usually a one night kind of affair that doesn't last the runtime of the movie. There's one or two exceptions, like the Miles Teller/Lio Tipton snowstorm lock-in comedy Two Night Stand, but I think we can agree that there's more scope for laughs with bad weather than there is with deadly viruses. Riffing heavily on The Odd Couple with a healthy dose of When Harry Met Sally thrown in, 7 Days starts off on familiar ground but with a modern twist, showing Zoom interviews of real couples who had arranged marriages talking direct to camera about meeting their spouse through what many see as an outdated method. With the title referring to the amount of time Ravi's parents knew each other before getting married, it's debatable whether this film is for or against the tradition of arranged marriage, but it's fair to say it's aware how old-fashioned the practice seems to the outside world.

Produced by the Duplass Brothers, debut director Roshan Sethi's film focuses on the interpersonal connections between the two main characters, mining the banter and chemistry Viswanathan and Soni (co-stars on the TV show Miracle Workers) have. Viswanathan (who also serves as an exec producer) has quickly become a leading light in romantic comedies with stand-out turns in Blockers and The Broken Hearts Gallery, and Soni is probably best known as Deadpool's cab driving sidekick, Dopinder, but despite some comedic touches (Rita's dating app bio lists her hobbies as "caring for her future in-laws" and her ideal date is "cooking for her man and watching a Bollywood movie"), 7 Days is light on laughs.

Treading familiar romantic comedy ground, most of the comedy is mined from how dissimilar Rita and Ravi are, with one a clean freak and the other a relaxed slob, putting Rita squarely in Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory as she tackles the straight laced Ravi's many hang ups, broadening his world with new experiences like alcohol and meat. There's some well placed jibes at overbearing Indian mothers (Rita's judgemental mother asks "you didn't show him the real you, did you?") and some unapologetically sweet moments between Ravi and Rita, but a late in the day twist derails the dynamic the film works so hard to set up, separating our two leads in a misjudged attempt at finding common ground with the audience.

Despite its weak, nondescript title (I'll offer up Living Arrangements as an alternative, but if you're spending the film thinking about what they should have done, there's a problem) and its mishandling of the Covid part of the storyline, it's undeniable that there's effortless charm and likeability coming from the interactions between the two leads. The lockdown set-up might be, if anything, too current and relatable to get past for some audiences looking for a sweet dose of escapism, but perhaps in a post Covid world we'll look at 7 Days as an odd curio to remind us how life was for a little while. Hopefully.

Verdict

2/5

7 Days screened as part of the 2021 London Film Festival. The full line-up can be found here.

ROMANTIC COMEDY review

Directed, edited, written and narrated by Elizabeth Sankey, lead singer of indie pop duo Summer Camp, Romantic Comedy looks at the history, stylings and motifs of the film genre, and how it's able to have such an emotional connection with its audience.

Comprised of re-purposed and contextually relevant clips from countless rom-coms, if you've seen any other films from the increasingly prevalent essay film documentary sub-genre, most notably Charlie Shackleton's excellent Fairuza Balk narrated teen movie exploration, Beyond Clueless, or the shorter form Inside Cinema doc strand currently available in the BBC iPlayer, you'll have a good idea of what to expect from the structure of the film. Romantic Comedy is presented slightly differently via the personal journey Sankey sends us on through her narration, starting off in a typical teenage girls bedroom before showing us how focused this genre is on making sure its audience's end goal is marriage. Along with Sankey's narration, there's also a chorus of largely female voices (among them The End of the F**king World star, Jessica Barden) to provide insight into various points this film raises, such as why Bridget Jones is both the "HBC" (Head Bitch in Charge) and also a problematic purveyor of ridiculous and dangerous beauty standards, proclaiming herself overweight at a perfectly normal 9 stone.

When dissecting the history of the genre, we go back as far as the 1930s and the screwball comedy era when the starlets were able to be the ones in charge before their agency was stripped away by the predominantly male writers and studio execs, and their only happiness to be found in the arms of the tall, dark and handsome leading men. It digs into the lunacy of the genre's more outlandish meet cute set-ups, like Sandy Bullock's near psychopathic behaviour in the dubiously titled While You Were Sleeping, as she lies to a man in a coma's family and pretends to be his fiancee. Although the title and set-up could easily be affixed to a stalker horror film, her actions are presented as cute and kooky, as the rom-com genre's leading ladies so often are with the rise of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. The most egregious examples of the MPDG figure are called out, as well as the 'lens of indieness' used to excuse those films' behaviour, like 500 Days of Summer's objectification of Zooey Deschanel's title character, and the rather unnecessary addition in the film's title sequence of calling another woman "bitch".

Sankey's narration openly admits that despite her admiration for the genre, it's not one that is as easily accessible to anyone that is non-white or non-straight, and so defers to her contributors to share their experiences of watching these films whilst also not seeing any approximation of their own lives reflected back at them. It's possibly the genre's greatest flaw, and while this film does cover it to an extent, it's probably fair to say that a thorough dissection of this issue is perhaps not Sankey's aim, and would have derailed what is essentially a celebration of the genre. As well as exploring the impact these flaws have on its captive audience, Romantic Comedy is also just a great opportunity to relive some classic moments the genre has given us, like Cameron Diaz and friends breaking into a rendition of the comically graphic 'The Penis Song' in The Sweetest Thing. Seriously, I wouldn't necessarily recommend watching The Sweetest Thing and its frank sexuality isn't something typical of the genre, but if you need a taster before watching this film, that scene is on Youtube for your eyes and ears to enjoy.

The soundtrack, written by Sankey's husband and Summer Camp bandmate Jeremy Warmsley, serves to pick up those sweeping romantic moments, like the song Women in Love and its backdrop of passionate cinematic embraces. It's here that the films bear the closest of its resemblances to Beyond Clueless, the soundtrack of which was also provided by Summer Camp. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as Beyond Clueless was one of my favourite films of the year it was released and the accompanying Summer Camp soundtrack is one I have listened to countless times, independent of the film; but despite the different targets and voices behind the films, Romantic Comedy doesn't hit quite as hard, if only by virtue of it being less unique an experience.

At a brisk 78 minutes, it still finds plenty of chances to bask in the reflective glow of the unattainable ideals the rom-com genre offers its audience. Montage heavy, moving from scene to scene, film to film at breakneck speed in order to illustrate the repeating motifs and archetypes at work across the genre; a rare exception to this is in the discussion of the rightly revered Nora Ephron and her script for When Harry Met Sally. As Harry and Sally (Billy Crystal and genre queen Meg Ryan) exchange barbed relationship advice to each other on the steps of a New York brownstone, the scene is allowed to play out to its redemptive conclusion. When done right, it's hard not to be swept up in the power these films have.

Romantic Comedy does throw a net that (arguably) lands outside of the genre boundaries of the title, bringing in God's Own Country and Silver Linings Playbook to sit alongside Mystic Pizza and Sleepless and Seattle, but it's at its best when celebrating the purest examples of the genre. To borrow a couple of film titles, Romantic Comedy is a fun collection of some simply irresistible moments in cinema that might make you fall in love, actually, with the genre all over again. Definitely one to consider renting for your next sleepover.

Verdict
3.5/5

Romantic Comedy is now available in the UK on Mubi.

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