Rom-Com / Erotic Thriller Double Bills

Swoon, then steam, with diverging takes on love

Rom-coms: where audiences go to enact their grandest dreams about human connection, physical intimacy, and emotional vulnerability.

Erotic thrillers: where audiences go to observe their worst nightmares about human connection, physical intimacy, and emotional vulnerability.

We usually celebrate one as a society around Valentine’s Day. What this newsletter presupposes is … maybe we shouldn’t.

Many rom-coms and erotic thrillers are two horns on the same goat, reflecting similar anxieties and issues through different outlooks. What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than recognizing how opposites attract?! I’ve selected five pairs that would make for a great double shot of love.

LIFE’S A BEACH

What happens in a contemporary setting when you stick a bunch of gay men on a beach in search of sunshine and sensuality? Maybe it’s something like Fire Island (available on Hulu), which restages Jane Austen amidst a queer utopia outside of NYC. Or maybe it’s more akin to Stranger by the Lake (available to rent from various digital platforms — beyond just the ones indicated on JustWatch), a gripping French murder mystery set on a secluded French cruising enclave where visitors have varying attitudes about their sexuality away from these like-minded gents. Both films feature a sensitive, soul-searching protagonist who fall for a hunky, hard-to-get guy. That object of their affection may hurt them … or he may hurt them.

CONTENT WARNING: Stranger by the Lake features sex scenes that will make Poor Things look PG. This frank filmmaking is ultimately integral to the matter-of-fact depiction of desire by Alain Guiraudie, but it will still be startling to see something unafraid of titillation even if it’s not exploitation.

(198)7TH HEAVEN

What was in the water back in 1987? It’s remarkable to look at two Best Picture nominees from that year as more or less the same story filtered through wildly different prisms. Let me describe a movie to you as follows: a successful New Yorker who enjoys both personal and professional fulfillment entertains a romantic fantasy by a charismatic, chaotic stranger when their betrothed leaves town and sends their world out of orbit. Is that the delightful, rom-com Moonstruck (available for free with ads on Tubi TV)? Or is it the scintillating, steamy erotic thriller Fatal Attraction (available on Paramount+, Peacock, and to rent from various digital providers)? The Reaganite yuppies clearly had a lot to work through!

SPY GAMES

“All is fair in love and war,” the proverb goes, and no one tests this proposition quite like romantic partners who have different allegiances in the bedroom than they do in the boardroom. This is played to messy, madcap effect in Duplicity (available to rent from various digital providers) as Julia Roberts and Clive Owen play corporate espionage agents trying to work both sides of an industry for their mutual benefit. It gets twisty and tense when — shocker! — these masters of manipulation start making marks of each other. But that pales in comparison to the shocker in WWII-era drama Allied (available on Paramount+) when Brad Pitt’s Canadian intelligence officer receives word that his wife, Marion Cotillard’s alleged French resistance agent, might be working undercover for the Germans. He’s given an ultimatum to kill her or face charges for treason. Talk about sleeping with the enemy…

REAL ESTATE THE OBVIOUS

Office relationships sure are something, especially when there’s a large power dynamic between a man at the top of a massive real estate empire and the woman he brings on board to handle his emotional labor. Two Weeks Notice (available for free with ads on Tubi) plays this for laughs as Sandra Bullocks’s neurotic corporate lawyer makes a deal with the devil by going to work for Hugh Grant’s aloof billionaire … only to find out that she can get a little cozier in hell than she imagined. Sanctuary (available for free on Hulu), on the other hand, plays this as a raw power game as Margaret Qualley’s dominatrix begins to escalate and assert her needs at the very moment when Christopher Abbott’s hotel scion looks to jettison her services. Both films have a somewhat sick sense of humor, though only the latter sizzles with the heat of two actors whose connection extends beyond trading verbal volleys.

FOXY IN THE HENHOUSE

Introducing a member of the opposite gender into a single-sex household is always a recipe for something cinematic to happen. In Ball of Fire (available on Peacock), the arrival of Barbara Stanwyck’s firecracker of a nightclub performer to a home full of bookish academics awakens the romantic interests of a sheepish Gary Cooper. They’re a match made in heaven, of course, provided he can stop tripping over himself. Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled (available on Netflix) finds the Thanatos to Howard Hawks’ Eros, however, when the genders are swapped. Colin Farrell’s strapping, sensuous Union soldier unsettles the dynamics when he stumbles unexpectedly upon a Southern girls’ school. The film hums because Coppola locates the throbbing sense of danger that accompanies the various desires emerging from his presence. It’ll have you rapt all the way until Nicole Kidman delivers one of her best line readings that isn’t “somehow heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”

Some people seem to have noticed: I accidentally linked to the wrong place for my review of Girls State in Sunday’s newsletter. Here’s where you can read that review!

I forgot to include this link last week — I reviewed (and hated) Argylle for The Playlist. Don’t see it.

Something you should have on your radar, however, is the coming-of-age film How to Have Sex. For whatever reason, I’m a very easy mark for movies directed by British women about the angst of adolescence (see: Fish Tank), so Molly Manning Walker’s take on Spring Breakers by way of Andrea Arnold’s social realism was very much up my alley. I talked to Walker for Slant Magazine about her extraordinary debut feature.