Rom-coms are like popcorn: enjoyable, but lacking a bit of substance. At this point, I think the tropes and story beats are so culturally ingrained that you can predict the plot of any rom-com without watching a single one. Meet-cute, falling in love, falling out, and getting back together… The structure is basically fixed. Why do we keep going back to the same old story then? Well, there are those who just like a little fluff, and then there are those who go crazy picking apart the details to find the deeper message.
I’m the second kind, and I just watched Love, Divided.
The movie in and of itself is a cute enough story, in that it’s a rom-com. But if you look a little deeper, there might just be a really interesting political message? More specifically, I think whoever wrote this is painfully aware of the economic nightmare we all live in and decided to make it just a little bit dreamy.
Let’s look at our two main characters, an inventor who likes quiet and an understandably noisy pianist… they're so different! They're going to have so much conflict! Except that no, they’re actually pretty similar. At their core, they’re two people just trying to get by while pursuing their passions, and it’s not easy. David, the inventor, hasn’t come out with anything in the past few years, and things are getting a bit tight. Valentina, the pianist, has to live on her own for the first time after leaving her controlling (if not downright abusive) partner. It’s a balancing act almost all of us are familiar with: figuring out how to do what we love while being required to make money because capitalism. And how does this go for them?
Eventually, David is confronted by a major corporation looking to buy out his current and future products to distribute them internationally - a solution to his financial woes? No, because David isn’t an idiot. Even if he were okay with whatever “adjustments” the big corporation would want to make to his products, he knows that whatever money he makes from the deal will come at the cost of his and other's small businesses losing customers and shutting down. The company cares about profit more than anything, even if that means giving kids mindless toys and “mentally alienating people”, so he decides to fight the system by refusing the deal.
Valentina, on the other hand, gets her first job working as a waitress, and she’s terrible at it. But is she fired? No, because her boss Sebas is all about community and mutual aid. She might not be the best worker, but he does his best to support her because he's struggling too. Ever since the neighborhood started gentrifying, he's had to make a lot of changes that he doesn't really understand, and now he has Valentina to complain about it with. Even better, her terrible waitressing is almost a way of getting back at his annoying clients. He’s the boss everyone dreams of, even giving her time off so she can go to an important audition which is effectively an interview for a new job.
Think about it: the whole concept of the movie is two people living in a terrible apartment with walls so thin you can hear a pin drop next door. They’re even facing the utter hell of having an awful landlord who won’t fix even major issues, and in the end, they just break down the wall between their apartments so they can be together! Is it utterly terrifying to see that David is so strong that he can effortlessly break through a brick wall? Yes! Is it satisfying to see tenants doing things that will infuriate their landlord without any thought for the consequences? Double yes! Heck, you can even argue that their love is anti-capitalist for how it's based purely on an emotional connection without any superficial concerns like looks, status, or wealth.
Love, Divided isn’t realistic, and it isn’t trying to be. As far as I can tell, only Valentina has any hope of fixing her economic situation by the end of the film, and the landlords are definitely coming for their deposits after they broke down the wall. But this isn't our nightmarish reality, it's Love, Divided. In their world, the same issues still exist, but without all the stress and consequences. A waitress can afford an enormous apartment in the city and an inventor has enough money from his last toy to survive for a few years while dealing with grief and trauma. It’s a life with just enough challenges to be exciting without all the struggles of real-life capitalism.
It's a dream.
Ultimately, Love, Divided is your average romcom, from the weird premise to all the same story beats. But it also does something I don’t see all that often: criticising social issues like those caused by capitalism by showing a world where those issues don’t matter. It's a concept that never even occurred to me before - criticising a system through the absence of its consequences - and I’m kind of obsessed. It's an interesting take that elevates Love, Divided from a basic enjoyable romcom to something with a bit more meaning, so I’d definitely recommend it. After all, since we don't live in Love, Divided's world, we could probably use some of that soft and sweet dream.
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