Yes, Canadian rom-coms are their own thing — and they say more about us than you might think

Canada is known for many things — poutine, hockey, passive aggressive apologies — but our great tradition of romantic comedies isn't one of them. As a devoted fangirl of the genre, it's tragic how underappreciated Canadian rom-coms are. While romantic comedies have fallen out of favour since they ruled the box office during their golden era in the 90s and early aughts, they remain one of the few genres of films that focus entirely on our complicated relationships to other people. 

American writer and critic Wesley Morris recently mused in an essay for the New York Times that "romantic comedy is the only genre committed to letting relatively ordinary people — no capes, no spaceships, no infinite sequels — figure out how to deal meaningfully with another human being." Like their American counterparts, Canadian romantic comedies primarily examine intimacy but they have an important and distinctly Canadian subtext: they are love stories about places as well as people.

For example, consider 2013's The Grand Seduction. Based on the earlier French-Canadian film Seducing Doctor Lewis (La grande séduction), it follows a young, jaded city doctor working in a remote community in Newfoundland and Labrador. The doctor, played by heartthrob Taylor Kitsch, is caught smuggling cocaine across a border and ends up being coerced into taking a one-month contract in Tickle Head, Newfoundland. Led by their charismatic mayor, the villagers all take turns trying to "seduce" the young doctor into permanently staying in the town in hopes of winning the contract for a new chemical factory. 

The romantic aspect of the film is not just the side story about the young doctor and the local jaded store clerk flirting and falling in love. It's also about the wider communal love between the villagers and the land that they occupy, and the broader social ties between them that "seduce" the doctor into investing in the long-term wellness of the village. As The Grand Seduction shows, Canadian romantic comedies are deeply local films, interweaving love and land together inside offbeat stories of ordinary Canadians.

Another great Canadian romantic comedy, Breakfast with Scot, tells the story of a retired NHL hockey player struggling to come out of the closet. Released in 2007, the film follows Eric McNally (played by Tom Cavanagh) as he unexpectedly becomes a dad when his long-time partner, Sam, becomes the legal guardian of a young pre-teen boy named Scot. There's plenty of romance between Eric and Sam as they discover what parental life is like — but the heart of the movie is about the community around the family. As Eric gradually steps out of the closet throughout the film and embraces Scot's flamboyant personality, Breakfast with Scot tells a love story that is about far more than just two people.

The theme of community and place defines Canadian romantic comedies, repeating throughout widely different films across decades. 2003's Mambo Italiano takes community even deeper to showcase intergenerational ties within an immigrant Italian family in Montreal. Angelo — the closeted gay son of two Italian immigrants who mistakenly ended up in Canada instead of the United States — falls in love with Nico, his bisexual best friend from childhood. Nico is also closeted and, after thoroughly breaking Angelo's heart, marries a woman in the film's climax. This sad ending may seem like a betrayal of the film's romantic comedy roots, but throughout Mambo Italiano, Angelo gets closer with his deeply conservative parents who ultimately accept and celebrate him.

In the movie's final scene, Angelo, his new partner and his parents stroll through a community garden in Montreal. The garden is comprised of mostly other Italian immigrant families, who had spent much of the film judging each other in comedic ways. Angelo's parents proudly hold their son's arm as they walk past the glaring other parents, celebrating their child and his same sex partner in defiance of everyone else. This moment is extremely affirming — but it's also uniquely Canadian in the way it centres local community and landscapes. 

One of my personal favourite romantic comedies, 2005's Sabah, takes up Mambo Italiano's themes in even deeper ways. Following a 40-year-old single immigrant Syrian woman named Sabah, the film explores her journey as she falls in love with a white man that she meets at a swimming pool. Sabah keeps her relationship with him hidden for months before finally revealing her second life to her wider family. Again, the story of Sabah is not just about two people falling in love, but community, multiple homelands and the city of Toronto itself as a secondary character.

While our current cultural context is consumed by an upending apocalypse and ecological disaster, the stories I crave are ones about everyday love. What better time — amid the profound disconnect and anxiety of our lives — to turn back to movies?- Gwen Benaway

Even earlier, in 1994, Sandra Oh's breakout film Double Happiness traces very similar themes within a Chinese-Canadian family living in Vancouver. The standard romantic comedy tropes of "boy meets girl" is followed, but the central narrative struggle of the film in Sandra Oh's journey to balance her family and community ties with her new romance (you can watch the film for free on CBC Gem right here). Of course, not all Canadian romantic comedies follow predictable storylines — see 2004's sexually explicit Come Lie with Me or 1992's necrophiliac love story Kissed — but, more than any other branch of romantic comedy, Canadian rom-coms are small, locally rooted stories about people falling in love with each other and their communities.

There are important critiques of Canadian romantic comedies — namely that the focus on land in Canadian love stories often erases the violent dispossession of Indigenous nations or mythologizes a multicultural ideal that isn't true — but the genre is a vibrant collection of unique love stories. There are so many more films to celebrate: Xavier Dolan's masterpiece Heartbeats (2010), Patricia Rozema's When Night is Falling (1995), Anne Wheeler's Better Than Chocolate (1999), the list goes on. Cataloging and watching all of them would take years, but it's worth it if you want to see classic love stories told through a distinctly Canadian lens.

As Canadian media struggles to compete against better-funded American content, it's important to look at what is distinct about our storytelling and film. The constraints placed on Canadian romantic comedies — smaller audiences, much lower budgets and less publicity — have produced deeply resonant love stories focused on the intimacies of small places and communities. While our current cultural context is consumed by an upending apocalypse and ecological disaster, the stories I crave are ones about everyday love. What better time — amid the profound disconnect and anxiety of our lives — to turn back to movies about deep connection and interpersonal love and care?