Sleepless in Seattle wanted to confuse our expectations about love

“Let’s go?” asks Sam (Tom Hanks) to Annie (Meg Ryan) taking her hand as a light breeze blows and the music increases in volume. The Seattle widower and the Baltimore reporter finally meet atop the iconic Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day, while Sam’s son Jonah (Ross Malinger), looks at them adoringly. This is just the beginning of their romance, but it’s the end of Insomnia of lovereleased 30 years ago and today remembered as one of the best romantic comedies of all time.

Unfolding in the typically gloomy period between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, the story between Annie and Sam begins thanks to a broadcastto which little Jonah participates with a request: to find a new one wife for his father. At one point, Sam is practically forced to join the call. Once online, he heartbreakingly describes the moment he fell in love with Jonah’s mother: “I knew it the first time I touched her,” he says, “touching her was like walking into a house, but a home I’ve never had.” known”. Thousands of miles away, Annie, who lives on the opposite side of the United States, is one of many listeners fascinated by the story, perhaps even by the sound of Sam’s voice alone. From there the idea of ​​a trip to meet him was born.

“You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie,” says Annie’s best friend Becky (Rosie O’Donnell), a warning to the character, and a summary of why Insomnia d‘love, directed by Nora Ephron from a screenplay by Ephron, David S. Ward And Jeff Arch, it’s still relevant 30 years later.

Nominated for two Academy Awards and one of the highest-grossing films of the 1993, Insomnia of love is the kind of film that comforts and confuses at the same time: “What if someone you’ve never seen, met or known is the only right person for you?” reads its tagline, a perfect premise for both a film horror is for a love story. Repeated viewing allows you to enjoy even the small details – one Gaby Hoffmann little girl booking Jonah’s flight to New York, Rob Reiner which explains how he hooks up in the 90s with a stunned Sam – but can also leave the viewer stunned. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review: «Insomnia d ‘love is as ephemeral as a talk show, studied as a late show, yet so warm and delicate that I smiled the whole time».

Director Nora Ephron, who slipped Insomnia of loveAnd Between Harry, meet Sally (1989) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), understood the mix of sour and sweet necessary to get drunk on love. According to the film producer Gary Foster, Ephron was hired as “a somewhat cynical New Yorker trying to spice up the story”; while Ephron said to Rolling Stone, in 1993, that he was only “looking for a cash injection”. But she knew in which direction he wanted to go and speaking of the film once he said: «Our dream was to make it happen a movie about how movies mess with your brain about lovethen, if we had done a good job, we would have become one of the films that would have messed people’s brains about love forever ».

The screenplay is punctuated by Ephron’s biting wit, including a reference to the “soup Nazi” before Seinfeld. (At one point, Annie enters her office at the Baltimore Sun and hears the tail end of a colleague’s speech: “He’s the meanest man in the world, but he makes the best soup you’ve ever eaten”). There is also the following exchange within the office:

Colleague: It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than to get married after you’re over forty.

Annie: That’s not true.

Becky: But it looks real.

But the DNA blatantly romantic like that he didn’t go astray. When after various passages the script arrived in the hands of Ephron, despite his disappointment A splendid love (1957) had already become a landmark. The first time he saw the love story that had as protagonists Cary Grant And Deborah Kerrwas “a hopeless, inexperienced kid,” Ephron told a Rolling Stone. As an adult, she continued, “I watch this film and I wonder what I was thinking.” In another interview she was more categorical and defined A splendid love a “tearjerker” film that appeals to the “deepest masochistic core of an individual… It really seems to be holding on to those pathetic female fantasies”.

Ephron realized that the only way to criticize, without disappointing them, is the expectations raised by films like A splendid love or A great love (1939) was to write a film equal to those. “We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too,” he said Rolling Stone. «We try to be smart, sophisticated And funny making films of this kind, but we want to be too».

The concept appears very clear in the scene where Rita Wilson (wife of Hanks, who in Insomnia of love plays his sister) sums it up A splendid love tearfully. “That scene didn’t make any sense,” Ephron would later admit. “It doesn’t advance the plot. You simply cannot imagine the film without it, because And its very essence”.

However, unlike more recent rom-coms, Insomnia of love it doesn’t wink at its audience or turn up its nose at the idea that movies can affect matters of the heart. “The marriage it’s complicated enough without lowering expectations,” says Annie’s boyfriend Walter (Bill Pullman, who had his moment of glory crossing Sandra Bullock in A love of his own of 1995), while their relationship ends without many frills. Better to reach for the stars than settle for crumbs, Ephron believed: “We all have unrealistic expectations», he said, «but this is not a reason to give up falling in love in a way that makes us feel important and magical».

It is this combination of sentimentality And skepticism to make it shine Insomnia of love. At the beginning of the film, both Annie and Sam say they have given up for different reasons each idealism. Sam had a magic love with his late wife, Maggie (Carey Lowell), which he does not believe could happen again. Annie, on the other hand, refuses that kind of love, settling for a secure relationship with poor Walter, good and allergic. “Destiny is something we made up to not face the fact that everything happens absolutely randomly”says Annie in the same movie where she ends up stalking Sam and Jonah both on the internet and in real life.

It is precisely this transformation – the abandonment of reality in the service ofintangible – to push Billy Crystal at the New Year’s party, lifting the boombox above my head by John Cusackto ensure that Julia Roberts ask Hugh Grant to love her and, yes, to lead Annie and Sam to the same iconic New York building despite the fact that they never spoke. As Ephron told a Rolling Stone: «NoThere is no one more romantic than a cynic.’

Thirty years after that revered meeting, Insomnia of love it is still able to captivate optimists and unbelievers. While it’s clear that Ephron knew everything—from the importance of a good salad dressing recipe to the identity of Deep Throat—she once joked with her usual wit and levity about becoming the future “queen of romantic comedy”saying to Rolling Stone: «I find it exhilarating to even think about it!». But fate, as often happens, seems to have intervened.