Guilty Pleasures (review I) By Julie Moggan

British director Julie Moggan bases her film on a simple question: why do people like Harlequin Mills and Boon novels if they are so full of idealized romance, sentimental clichés and repetitive love formulas? In other words, how does popular culture elect such idols, even though they know that more erudite thinkers condemn them? What is it that directs aesthetic taste towards the appreciation of standardization?

The answer is quite an interesting analysis of people’s identification with artistic or fictional idols. The Harlequin books themselves are put aside so that Moggan can investigate the people involved in this cultural environment: the authors, the readers (mostly women), their husbands and even the muscular models who pose for the book covers. The middle-class British woman in her fifties and the thirty-something suntanned model have in common the wish to “be better”, or be someone else: better loved, better looking, sure to find a happy ending.

When it comes to identification issues, two lines of thought immediately come to the fore. The first one believes that these stories cannot have an influence on the readers, because they are well aware of their fictional nature, and the second one, a feminist point of view, suggests that women are fooled by the promises within. Moggan prefers a third way, a more psychological one, suggesting no direct effect of only books, but pointing them out as an explicit part of a larger cultural movement that shapes people’s expectations and leads them to permanent frustration.

Interestingly enough, no specific culture is considered to accept these ideas more deeply than the other: Japanese, British, Indian and American people all transfer their desire for escapism to objects. Whether it is the woman with her novels, her husband with his tools or the model with his own body, all people in this film lead their lives concerned with the gaze of others and with how close their future will look to those of the heroes in Under the Millionaire’s Mistletoe, The Maverick Prince and High-Society Seduction.

By Bruno Carmelo