SCREEN CAPSULE: The New Romantic (2018)
Carly Stone’s debut feature attempts to present an innovative take on a standard story, failing to save itself from careless shortcomings.
“As your local hopeless romantic, I’m sad to report that romance is dead.” This is just one of the many grand, ostensibly disillusioned statements made by the college senior Blake Conway (Jessica Barden) in the 2018 rom-com “The New Romantic.” Blake writes a sex column for the college newspaper, which her unimpressed editor (Avan Jogia) decides to cut for the lack of originality, and — well — sex. Everything changes when Blake meets the precocious Morgan (superb Camila Mendes), who introduces her to the world of wealthy older men willing to pay for pleasure and companionship. Through a regretfully hasty cameo, Morgan tells Blake that “a girl should know how pretty she is in order to find her powers.”
In the world of sugar arrangements, these sexual “powers” can be exchanged for whatever the pretty girl in question wants: in Morgan’s case, “everything.” Tempted by the enigmatic promises of material gain, the prospect of saving her column, and a potential opportunity for a final verdict on whether contemporary romantic engagement is really reduced to swipes and fuck buddies, Blake decides to engage in an arrangement with an older economics professor Ian (Timm Sharp), a finance-bro-twenty-years-later, who doesn’t date as he “doesn’t want to spend his time texting or fighting.”
Ian is educated, successful, and well-versed in the world of sugar dating. In exchange for intercourse and fun dates in hip, upscale joints, Blake’s currency of choice is romance, not purses (she’s not like other sugar babies). The romance Ian can give comes in shape of a new Vespa, a necklace, lavish picnics and similar perks, timed in a familiarly romantic fashion, including the cringeworthy jewelry box clap a-la-Richard-Gere in Pretty Woman (1990). Blake is swooned, leaving the audiences perplexed by her dismally low standards for love, or whatever she perceives as love. But a careful viewer is concerned much earlier: what does Blake really define as romance, if she sees it as a commodity in the same realm of material gifts? The film tries to recover itself by offering a voiceover scene of Blake’s vague interest in the anthropological setting of gold-digging, but all we get is a faux-analysis, AKA three seconds in a college library.
The disappointment here is two-fold. Blake’s need for money comes from the fact that she’s a journalism student, graduating with a ton of debt without any promising prospects. Carly Stone, the film’s writer/director, decided to write Blake as a journalist, so that her curiosity could drive the story. But the intended passion for gonzo is instead replaced by unfledged obstinacy, fooling only the most gullible with Blake’s Hunter S. Thompson Halloween costume, and cleverly used journalistic references. “Maybe relationships aren’t supposed to be for love, but for survival,” Blake concludes, unaware that mutual benefits between two people need not be in material form, thus proving that her obsession with Nora Ephron and Jane Austen has been focused merely on the clichéd appearance of romance, never really considering the importance of genuine human connection.
The twenty-eight-year-old Stone’s directorial debut unfortunately promises more than it can deliver, resulting in an unpleasant thematic scattershot. The film could have gotten away with being a surface-level adolescent story about the challenges of modern dating — yet another in a series of Carrie Bradshaw reiterations — only this time she’s graduating from college and Tinder’s a thing. Yet when “The New Romantic” rightfully addresses sugar arrangements as prostitution, but then lets the protagonist get away with her derogatory attitudes toward sex work, the movie fails the very goal it set for itself.
In a special for The Globe and Mail, Stone said:
“My film is related to #MeToo in that the whole #MeToo movement relates to the way our society functions. When I was writing, I asked myself: What’s more powerful — money or sex? A woman can harness her sexuality for power, but who has the ultimate power, and why?”
This attempt to elucidate the imbalance of power in the present-day sex work is evident in the film, with excellent design and costume choices (Blake’s cheap, revealing clothing vs. Ian’s deliberately minimalist condo), and cinematography (recurring close-ups on Blake’s childlike, wide-eyed face vs. Ian’s aging one, that serve as a constant reminder of the artificial, transactional nature of their rapport). But beyond a few such memorable moments, we don’t get much else — in lieu witnessing Blake’s persistent imploring of her best friend/roommate Nikki (Hayley Law) to confirm she’s “not a hooker.” Blake is never challenged by her own insincerity, a pitfall thinly veiled in gauzy lighting, indie pop transitions and a wardrobe that can double as an ASOS commercial.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment comes during the crucial moment in which the movie panics, showing a heartbreaking scene of sexual abuse — one that seems directly to result from the strained power dynamics of sugar arrangements — only to dilute it moments afterwards by attempting to resuscitate the idea of romance the film killed at the very beginning. Just like its protagonist, The New Romantic begins with a naive attempt at cynicism, engaging with profound topics to “discover a deeper truth,” only to abandon them and run back desperately to the overused model of romance delimited by cosmetic acts that feel forced and redundant. The outcome? A tonal hesitation which makes this 82-minute feature feel significantly longer.
Blake might be right, “if Harry met Sally in 2018, they’d just end up as fuck buddies,” but the issue of contemporary courtship in The New Romantic had a potential that remained unexploited on several fronts. If seeking a (long overdue) film which genuinely tries to redefine romance in a modern context, The New Romantic will not deliver, at least not without also inadvertently shaming sex work, and hypocritically replaying the boilerplate rom-com narrative, while being only occasionally entertaining.
SCREEN CAPSULE is a film/TV review project of Bes Arnaout, in which she attempts to help mainstream critical consumption of the moving image through non-academic criticism of the formal techniques and the thematic content of all screen-media.
Bes can be reached at bes.arnaout@princeton.edu