All volumes

Romantic Comedy — Volume 1The promise that has to be paid for

Five films that know exactly which rule they are touching: one honors it in full, one moves its center, one reverses its message while leaving the surface intact, one gives away the ending immediately and shifts the tension onto the cause, one lets a death into a comedy. The full map of what can be done with a convention.

Romantic Comedy — Volume 2Distance is always a fear

Fame, money, a screen, an ocean: they look like circumstances and always turn out to be fears. Five devices for governing what a viewer knows before the characters do, up to the limit case of two leads who barely share a scene and hold to the last.