Guilty Pleasures

Audience Reviews

View All (1) audience reviews

Audience Member Though I would never read a Harlequin novel (the topic of this documentary) I am a bit ambivalent about the concept of "romance". As a former Objectivist, I have retained some of Ayn Rand's ideas about the need for literature and art in general to be idealised (she called her own style "romantic" and even wrote a "Romantic Manifesto" to defend her philosophy of literature) and I remember a few lectures about the importance of finding romantic love or keeping the romance in relationships. However, as a Catholic convert, I tend to see this whole obsession with romance as a parody of, if not a real threat to, genuine marital love. "Guilty Pleasures" focuses on three women past their prime with unenviable love lives: an overweight Indian divorcee still pining after her ex-husband, himself involved in an intense erotic relationship with his sports car and her technical specs; a working-class British divorcee living with a manic depressive chain smoker; and a married Japanese woman who is sacrificing her family to a fondness for ballroom dancing and her girlish crush on her dance instructor, in a real-life story very reminiscent of the Japanese movie "Shall We Dance". Interspersed with these portraits are those of two males from the other side: an elderly British author of more than fifty romance novels with a passion for solitude, and an American model for dozens of Harlequin covers, himself a solitary divorcee with obsessive compulsive disorder and a passion for New Age books and kooky theories about love. I expected "Guilty Pleasures" to lean towards the more critical side, cynically contrasting the daily lives of these generally unglamorous people with the over-the-top fantasies of their shared fictional world. But things do not really go the way you would expect them to go. Romance novels are really about happy ends, and whether or not they are true to life depends on whether the readers actually can find the kind of fulfillment promised in their pages. I do consider Harlequin novels to be atrociously written, manipulative softcore porn, and as such a bad influence on anyone who reads them. However, as a degenerate offspring of romantic literature, they may present their readers with a glimpse of a better life, however impure, deceitful and unrealistic that glimpse may be. To that limited extent, such novels are morally superior to the even more corrupt naturalism of much "genuine literature": at least, they can potentially enrich lives, especially the more desperate ones. This mostly negative but nevertheless ambivalent vision of the genre is more or less that of the film, which I found to be generally fair to all the people involved. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Guilty Pleasures

My Rating

Read More Read Less POST RATING WRITE A REVIEW EDIT REVIEW