The view: Who can save the romcom?

If it takes a special kind of churl to be appalled at the sight of young people in love, then the studios have made sourpusses of us all. Of course, raging against the romcom is an old trick – but this is, I believe, a war that can't be surrendered, the genre's crimes having gone a long way to ruining the entire notion of romance in modern cinema. And that is a problem, the memory of Bogart & Bacall and Grant & Hepburn now tainted for a new generation by a thousand soul-withering Jennifer Aniston films . It takes a whole load of dreadful to besmirch a legacy like that – but besmirched it's been by the string of filmic bad dates on which contemporary cinemagoers have ventured out. How we recoil at the memory of that long, painful evening with Failure to Launch ; the disastrous encounter with All About Steve ; the nightmarish humiliation of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past . But like any true romantic, hope springs on in my battered heart, which is why I'm cautiously but genuinely optimistic at the idea of Love Birds , a project to be filmed and set in the erotic dreamscape of New Zealand, detailing the amorous trials of a will-they-won't-they couple played by Sally Hawkins and Rhys Darby (still best known as Murray from Flight of the Conchords). And it's because of that pair of casting decisions that I'm feeling quite so hopeful, the crux of all successful (or otherwise) romances of course the two principals. Granted, there are caveats here. Darby's budding film career has hardly been aided by his involvement in the cataclysmic The Boat That Rocked , while his time in Conchords hinted more at a mastery of platonic male friendship than pleasing the ladies. For Hawkins, meanwhile, her much-lauded turn in Happy-Go-Lucky seemed to me designed as an alternative to waterboarding, although as the luckless barmaid Ella in the BBC's Patrick Hamilton adaptation Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky she was pitch-perfect in her chipper vulnerability. And yet for all that there's a weird but definite spark to the mere idea of the two together. Here, in some strange way, you can see the shape of an actual couple, slightly unlikely and each some way from flawless, and who look as if they could feasibly share their most tender moments between bickering in Sainsbury's and dealing with a minor plumbing emergency. Because for me, the best screen couples need at least a trace of the stumbling, shambolic nature of a real relationship (and the sexual heat that comes with it). Thus, even last year's thinking person's romcom 500 Days of Summer floundered: Zooey Deschanel is a nicely sugary presence, but the most plausible frisson in her career to date came in Elf , while gifted as he is Joseph Gordon-Levitt has as much real life behind his eyes as a Henry . No, too pretty and too clean the both of them – and this was, let's remember, as good as it gets by some distance. For the rest of the genre, what does for them even more than the tossed-off scripts and sloppy direction is that it's impossible to buy their co-stars as anything but co-stars – perfect professionals perfectly matched, entirely bland and interchangeable. Whereas the finest screen couples are often the ones that seem at first glance the very oddest and most absurd: Harold and Maude, Frankenstein and the Bride, Samantha Morton and Sean Penn in Woody Allen's highly underrated Sweet and Lowdown . Clearly it's too early to say whether Hawkins and Darby will be joining them – but there again, just the thought might be enough to sustain anyone planning to go and see The Back-Up Plan .