CW: Narratives In Party Off

Our film, Party Off!, is a romantic comedy it takes inspiration from many different romantic comedies, including Love Actually and Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason. We have taken guidance from both these films and also from the narrative theories that we have looked at; throughout our film and its opening these narrative themes will be set up.

Narrative Enigma:

In our film we plan to use narrative enigma. We hope to be able to keep the look of the main character a secret. In order to do this, but still make sure it is clear that she is the main character we will have her voice first, as the voice over. When we do introduce her we will show her coming back up after clearly being sick, we plan to have her look as unglamorous as we can, by having her cry before hand and have her mascara running, to make this obvious.

This choice was made after reflecting upon the opening sequence of Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason. In this one of the early shots of Bridget, who has previously been set up as the main character, is of her about to jump out of a plane. We thought through what the director was creating with this shot and figured that it was to establish some form of relate-ability between the character and the audience, the fact that Bridget is no seen as glamorous all the time makes her, as a character, more relatable.

Todorov’s Structure:

We will follow Todorov’s narrative structure, but not strictly. We will create the starting equilibrium through the scrapbook, showing the happy times before the start of the film and, through the scrapbook, we will move towards the disequilibrium. By having a pre-established equilibrium that is only touched upon through the starting sequence we are somewhat mirroring Love Actually. The characters in Love Actually have a back story proceeding the events of the start of the movie; we pick this up through the start of the opening and throughout the film. By having the equilibrium pre-established we save time in the opening, meaning we can include more content within it.

Propp’s Archetypes:

We do not have many of Propp’s character archetypes. This is because, throughout the examples we have looked at and through our research we have not seen many examples where a Romantic Comedy contained these characters.

The link that we have been able to make, however, to Propp’s archetypes is between the main character, which we have seen is comparable to the hero, mainly because they commonly get the prize/prince/princess. We have also found a comparison to the villain, a commonly occurring character that often tries to steal the prize, they are also somewhat comparable to the false hero. Finally, we have found links to the helper, we originally thought that they could be the friends. We have not been able to find links to the donor or dispatcher.

Binary Opposition:

The most common and obvious binary opposition that we have seen is between the main character and their love interest. In all our examples and almost all Romantic Comedies the two are male and female. There are not many other binaries that we have noticed.

In our film, we plan to also have the binary opposition between the love interest and the main character. We have also made a binary opposition between the main character and her friend. The friend will be a popular, sporty and a stereotypical cheerleader type person whereas the main character will be unpopular, dorky and stereotypically nerdy. This will create conflict, naturally, later on in the film.