When it comes to the romantic comedy genre, there is plenty of griping to be done. When Harry Met Sally portrays heroine Sally Albright as a melodramatic shrew. You've Got Mail asks us to celebrate a man who gaslights the object of his affection and destroys her beloved family business in the process. Sleepless In Seattle encourages glorified stalking. Pretty Woman depicts a rose-tinted version of the realities of sex work. Love Actually is a mess of anti-feminism and unprofessional inter-office relationships, actually. That doesn't mean I don't love them, of course. They are twee representations of their time. But if you were ever to remake any of these projects then you would need severe rewrites and difficult decisions about what is permissible in modern society.
By the time you cut out the unrealistic or unacceptable plot points and characters, you'd be left with a hollow version of the original. But what's strange about Notting Hill - one of my favourite romantic comedies of all time which, as it happens, is currently streaming on Netflix - is that, unlike the other classics of the genre, the impossible nature of remaking it doesn't have anything to do with its content. Aside from the impossibility of affording a three storey townhouse in the exclusive area of London on the proceeds of an unsuccessful business, the core concept is rather ageless. There will always be romantic fables of what happens when a person falls for someone who is, on paper, beyond them. But you couldn't remake it now, because there's no one in the world who could play Anna Scott. In my opinion, Hollywood no longer possesses an actress fit for the job.
The problem is established immediately in the opening credits: a montage of clips of Julia Roberts at premieres and on red carpets, accompanied by Elvis Costello's She. 'She may be the mirror of my dreams,' Costello sings. 'A smile reflected in a stream, she may not be what she may seem, inside her shell.' It was not written about the actress, but it could have been. And then we shift to Hugh Grant's William Thacker, a foppy, floppy travel bookshop owner, wandering down the Portobello Road, unaware that his life is about to change when the world's most famous actress walks into his store in sunglasses and a beret. He sees her enter and practically melts through the floorboards.
It is not enough to accept that Anna Scott is the world's most famous, beautiful actress in the world. Notting Hill is so successful precisely because you don't have to suspend your disbelief. We are able to give in and see Anna Scott as the world's most famous, beautiful actress, because Julia Roberts was. The impact of her excellent performance in the film is doubled, tripled, made infinitely more effective because we believe it unequivocally. The red carpet clips, showing her bathed in the light of camera flashes, were not filmed for Notting Hill: they were real, archive shots of her real life as an A-Lister. When Anna talks about her cruel boyfriends, I think of Julia's well-publicised romances with leading men of the time. When Anna embarrasses Hugh Bonneville's Bernie by telling him her salary for her last picture - 'fifteen million dollars' - it is all the more effective because we know that's exactly what Julia made for making this film. If you watched Notting Hill on VHS a mere year or two after its cinematic release, the scene in which William reads about her recent Oscar win seems completely reasonable: Julia won her own eighteen months later.
The magic of Notting Hill comes from the idea that an everyday man could win the heart of a superstar. If anyone but Julia had signed on in 1999, it simply would not have been as powerful.
Now, I would argue, we don't have a Julia Roberts. We don't have a woman in Hollywood who is as renowned for her undeniable, glamorous beauty as well as her unmistakable talent. Who would you cast now, if you were forced to? Anne Hathaway? Jennifer Lawrence? Margot Robbie? They're all good actors, and they are all beautiful. But there is also something missing. It's not something tangible. I would never suggest that Anne isn't warm enough to be this generation's Julia, that Jennifer isn't elegant enough, that Margot isn't tall enough. It's something else that I can't put my finger on, something magical. For that special time in Hollywood history, Julia Roberts wasn't an actress. She was a goddess. And I don't really think there are any left.
It also comes down to sheer recognisability. The humour of Anna first meeting William's friends, or the joy of seeing her take down the men being cruel about her in the restaurant, requires us to believe that every single person in the world knows who she is. In 1999, I don't think any cinema goer in the Western world could possibly fail to recognise Julia Roberts. There is no contemporary equivalent: a woman who both your teenage daughter and your mum would be able to name. Anne, Jennifer, Margot. Emily Blunt. Scarlett Johansson. They just don't measure up.
Anna Scott succeeds as a romantic comedy heroine because writer Richard Curtis has observed the reality of fame, wrapped his words in a tissue paper-filled box, fixed it with a golden bow, and given it to the only person in the world who could truly get it. 'She may be the face I can't forget, the trace of pleasure or regret, may be my treasure or the price I have to pay, she may be the song that summer sings, maybe the chill that autumn brings, maybe a hundred different things, within the measure of a day.'
She may be Anna Scott. She may be Julia Roberts. But it is where the two fuse where romantic comedy perfection is made.
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