Love Actually y la esfera musical como cómplice de la perpetuación de los roles de género tradicionales.

Abstract

The romantic comedy remains today as one of the most demanded film genres by the consumer society. In spite of the numerous and recent examples in which we can find a new gender approach, where the empowerment of women prevails or their absence is visible, most of the romantic comedies that have reached the big screen and have been considered classics of commercial cinema, are based on the perpetuation of traditional roles. This is precisely the case of the parallel plots that occur in the movie Love Actually (United Kingdom, 2003), directed by Richard Curtis, considered one of the most popular English romantic comedies developed in Christmas and whose soundtrack would be, also, projected as a powerful sales product. Last December, fourteen years after its Premiere, social networks opened a chain of discussion where they proposed the visualization of the film from a feminist perspective. Throughout our article we won’t only study the roles played by the female and male characters, whose characterization perpetuates the image of the woman, among others, as caregiver, sexual object, mother, femme fatale, meanwhile men are projected as powerful, cultured and unfaithful, but we will focus on those elements which constitute the attractive package that manages to convert a plot based on clearly unequal principles in a candid cinematographic piece that pursue being a poem of love in all its forms. In this process, as we will see throughout the text, along with the ambitious distribution of the group of actors and the use of the sense of humor, music will act as an accomplice and main object in the development of the different plots, supporting with the characterization of roles and as a key ingredient of main scenes of the movie.