"10" as a Romantic Comedy

Our 5th week in class we examined the movie 10 as a romantic comedy. I read chapter two from one of our required text books, The Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre by Tamar Jeffers Mcdonald and connected her definition and characteristics of the romantic comedy the the characteristics of the film 10. These are the significant characteristics that stood out to me showing 10 as a good example of a romantic comedy:

As defined by McDonald, "a romantic comedy is a film in which has a its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearted way and almost always to a successful conclusion" (McDonald, 9). The movie "10" falls into this definition of a romantic comedy by a "light-hearted" portray of a man going through his mid-life crisis and pursuing a woman, who is not his significant other and is in fact much younger than his significant other. The film also follows some of the generic elements found in romantic comedies. "10" has visual characteristics such as an urban setting, what seemed to be the Hollywood Hills and an extremely high end, swanky bachelor pad. The film did however, go against the typical stock characters depicted by McDonald, "characters who will be a couple by the film's end both start out with an unsuitable partner" (McDonald, 11). In "10" the male lead starts out with the right woman and only realizes she is the right woman by almost being with the wrong woman. The film also follows the ideology of a romantic comedy in that, "at the heart of every romantic comedy is the implication of sex" (McDonald, 13). At the heart of the main characters struggle with his age is his need to partake in the "free-love" era he lives in and the want to bed a younger woman which he describes as a "vision." I found this movie to be a good example of a romantic comedy.