Like most genres of cinema, really all if we’re being totally honest, romantic comedies march solidly and determinedly to a set and little varied formula.
It makes sense – if people are watching you for an idealised vision of falling in love and the romanticised delights of happily ever after, then you had damn well better deliver that rose-tainted, dreamily-frosted take on all things love and romance or face the consequences.
Just Say Yes, a Dutch romantic comedy directed Appie Boudellah and Aram van de Rest to a script Boudellah co-wrote with Mustapha Boudellah, Marie Kiebert and Maarten van den Broek, has heeded this sage reality, serving up a romantic comedy that ticks all the boxes you’d expect.
Rather happily, however, they have managed to do this without once feeling hopelessly or listlessly derivative, which is about as much a miracle in the rom-com genre as finding your one true love via a spilt coffee on the blouse meet-cute; in other words, a huge thing.
What makes Just Say Yes feel fresh and original rather than a rehashed steaming pile of overdone tropes and cliches is that it puts a great deal of time and effort into giving vibrantly fun life to its key characters, particularly proptagonist Lotte (Yolanthe Cabau), a talented television producer who remains hopelessly romantic despite all evidence to the contrary.
Her dreamboat of a long-term boyfriend Alex (Juvat Westendorp), a presenter at the same channel as Lotte, may be charmingly good-looking but he’s also a socially and romantically clueless git who spends his days claiming credit for great ideas including those by his girlfriend.
His behaviour does make you wonder more than once what on earth Lotte sees in him but Just Say Yes makes a solidly good case for love making you blind, a sobering reality that applies even to consummately put together people like Lotte.
She’s not perfect, no, and her predilection for love solving everything does make her miss the bleeding obvious in her life over and over again but she is ultimately a wise and capable person and when she realises that Alex may not be the one for her – easy to spot; he dumbs her soon after they get engaged – she sets about remaking her life (after the requisite amount of ice cream has been consumed, of course).
Of course, love and life in a rom-com is never that straight forward and so while Lotte is faced with re-inventing her life, the handsome Chris (Jim Bakkum) comes into the picture as program ideas consultant at the channel, changing a simple Lotte-Alex equation into a far more complicated proposition.
Naturally as is the way with rom-coms, Lotte is blind to how powerfully lovely, decent and handsome Chris is – quite how that is is mystifying since it is readily apparent from the get-go that Chris is the good and caring yin to Alex’s slimily go-getting yang but let’s just chalk it up to no harm, no foul narrative convenience – and to the fact that while Alex may be wishy-washy and want her back, her true path in life lies with the man she initially sees only as a colleague.
As these last paragraphs would ably demonstrate, Lotte, for all her great capabilities as a woman and a media professional, is an alm ost complete slave to rom-com convention.
She has a longstanding boyfriend who doesn’t know what he wants and who we ultimately know is not right for Lotte and in Chris, she has the man of her dreams who can actually deliver, well mostly on her highfalutin ideas of what love and romance should look like.
There are the inevitable misdirections, misunderstandings, and soberly comedic moments where some rather serious things go down in delightfully amusing fashion (rom-coms are very much in love, no pun intended, with the spoonful of sugar makes the hard narrative medicine go down) and the villains and sort-of villains such as Lotte’s Influencer sister Estelle (Noortje Herlaar) who either receive their comeuppance (Alex we’re looking at you) or a restorative reconciliation (hello Estelle), an essential part of any romantic comedy where justice is as much a part of the equation as starry-eyed romance.
So, Just Say Yes is all about the righting of wrongs, perfect love finding it seamlessly happy expression, and the world being remade in the kind of flawless image often denied to us mere mortals by the cold, hard hand of reality, which is all very and inarguably cliched as hell.
But here’s the thing; for a film made up of all the expected parts, Just Say Yes manages to feel vivaciously, happily, charmingly alive in the way of all expertly-crafted, gorgeously-realised rom-coms.
It’s right up there with many of the rom-com classics because it remembers that any great love story must have a character we care about – tick! – a situation full of goodies and baddies with no lack of certainty that the former will prevail and the latter will fall to their loveless doom – tick! – and a warm and reassuring that for all the awful things life serves up at times, that our protagonist, though full of pain and indecision in the interim, will ultimately emerge into a far happier, more joyful place.
At the end of the day, or quite a few desperately sad or blissfully happy days depending on where we are in the story, Just Say Yes leaves you feeling uplifted and good about the world.
That is precisely where any decent rom-com worth its meet-cute payoff should leave you, and Just Say Yes delivers on its main job with the kind of skip-out-of-the-room happiness that is the right of any consumer of confected romantic perfection.
Life rarely gives us exactly what we want, which is why we need fiction and why we need rom-coms like Just Say Yes which understand that we want everything to be perfect and wonderful and that we want a protagonist such as Lotte to be an agent of that flawless romantic wonder and that if the two can come together with wit, verve and hilariously-delivered but heartwarmingly reassuring resolution then we will be able to walk away and feel like maybe things aren’t so bad after all, a prodigious feat for any film in the age of COVID where the sting of reality is being felt far more than normal and films as good as Just Say Yes are needed more than ever.