Like the Christmas lights and the flurry of big-budget supermarket ad campaigns, the annual rehashing of upset over Love, Actually has become one of the great festive traditions.

The 2003 Richard Curtis film has become part of the Christmas Movie Canon, but increasingly laden with guilt. Fans find it heartwarming but every year it is picked over for political correctness, sexism, ageism and general creepiness. As of 2019, the year of the diabolical Brexmas Election, Love, Actually’s glittery coffin received yet a further nail: being used as inspiration for political party campaign videos.

The much-reviled – and widely memed – Andrew Lincoln-silently-woos-Keira Knightley scene was the muse in question. Lincoln plays Mark, the best man of Knightley’s character’s new husband, who is, somewhat inconveniently, in love with his mate’s new bride. He decides Christmas is the time to tell her this, on her doorstep, via a series of cards upon which his declaration of love has been written.

This week British Prime Minister Boris Johnson captured headlines when he recreated the scene for an election video. As Hugh Grant – Love, Actually’s star as the fictional Prime Minister (that’s his character name: ‘the Prime Minister’) – pointed out on Radio 4’s Today Programme, Johnson missed one vital line from the original script: “And at Christmas you tell the truth”.

Expand Close Love Actually: Andrew Lincoln and Keira Knightley. Photo by Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock (1590118a) Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock / Facebook

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Whatsapp Love Actually: Andrew Lincoln and Keira Knightley. Photo by Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock (1590118a)

But did Johnson realise the long and divisive history of the cinematic parody he was getting into? Did his campaign team raise the problems that have been identified with that doorway scene? Let us illuminate them:

Curtis’ intentions were actually fairly democratic, not to say revolutionary. The scene was inspired by Bob Dylan’s iconic video for ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, in which the singer spelled out the rapid-fire lyrics to the song on sheets of card. The Love, Actually version was the result of a bit of writers’ block, during which, Curtis says, “I write [the numbers] one through five on a piece of paper and come up with five ideas, so I can allow myself the option of choice.”

In this case, the ideas were for typically romantic gestures deployed by a man who has lived, silently, in unrequited love.

Curtis then, he told Elle in 2013, “went out to the four girls who were in my office. I told them, ‘There’s this guy, he’s never told you he loved you. Which of these ideas are romantic and which are off-putting?’ [I had ideas like] filling the courtyard outside her house with roses, and they went ‘yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck,’ for the first four. Then I had the idea of the Bob Dylan signs.” This went down rather better. “The scene was selected by group research.”

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In hindsight, it was perhaps always doomed – I’d be curious to talk to these “girls” who, presumably, were employed by Curtis and were therefore pressed to pick the best of a bad bunch. Plus, the central concept – that a man is in love with his best friend’s wife – was always there from the start. Anyway, roll on 2003, and a fresh-faced, pre-Walking Dead Lincoln is busily scribbling out the phrases ‘JUST BECAUSE IT’S CHRISTMAS’ and ‘TO ME, YOU ARE PERFECT’. Yes, the actor wrote those cards himself.

“It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good,” Lincoln told EW in 2013. “Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.”

Lincoln, then best known for playing the neurotic and hapless Simon Casey in Channel 4 sitcom Teachers, was chuffed with the script for his biggest blockbuster role to date. “I remember vividly when I got the part,” he said in 2013. “It was such a good script. When I read it, I knew in my heart that that was such a beautiful scene at the doorway with Keira. I just thought, ‘This is marvelous’.”

He went on to explain that the moment “sort of sent shivers because I just loved it. It’s always nice, being in a romantic film, but playing the only guy who doesn’t get the girl… not getting the girl in that manner is absolutely beautiful.”

When it finally came around to shooting, Lincoln remembered the scene as being “very sweet and honest”, not least because having “to be infatuated with Keira Knightley’s character… [was] not one of the greatest challenges I’ve been posed as an actor”.

It’s a good job that Lincoln got so much out of the role, as the original reviews barely mentioned him. In general, they were lukewarm – the film has a critics score of 64pc – and largely praised Bill Nighy’s performance as lecherous old rocker Bill Mack and Grant as the PM, while occasionally dismissing the rest of the film as “a slog”, “an embarrassment” and “rubbish”. Such was the plethora of plotlines in the film that Lincoln’s was often overlooked for Emma Thompson’s (sombre infidelity), Colin Firth’s (bizarre pan-European romance) or Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s (airport-dashing schoolboy crush).

Indeed, the doorway scene was something of a sleeper controversy, the kind that needed the perfect storm of a timely anniversary, the emergence of Twitter and an awakening sense of sexual politics to achieve re-appraisal.

The first online suggestion that the scene was anything other than swoon-inducing was from culture writer Bim Adewunmi in 2009, less than a week before Christmas. But hers was a lone voice for several years.

In 2012, Australian journalist Adam Liaw stepped up and called the storyline “creepy”, and had a few people agree among the tidal wave of fans deeming it “lovely”.

Within a year, the tide had started to turn: “One mistake Love, Actually defenders are making is not throwing the Keira Knightley story overboard. It’s an anchor and will sink you all,” warned prescient film critic Christopher Orr.

Eight days later and the first dagger had been thrown: the famously acerbic culture writer Lindy West, famed for her viral 2010 takedown of the Sex and the City movie, released another humdinger on Jezebel, titled: “I Rewatched Love, Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You”.

Nobody really comes off well in West’s revised critique, but few are deemed as responsible for patriarchal gaslighting as Lincoln’s character. “Thanks, Love, Actually,” she writes. “Thank you for telling a generation of men that their intrusiveness and obsessions are ‘romantic’, and that women are secretly flattered no matter what their body language says.”

As for the doorway scene? West is succinct: “I know it’s early, but I’m calling it. Artistic low point of the 21st century.”

The piece acted as a torch paper of revelation. The term ‘cancelled’ may not have existed in 2013, but that was certainly what was happening to Love, Actually. Other awkward snippets about the film — and that particular scene — bubbled up through social media: Knightley was just 17 when she played the fought-over wife (Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing the husband, was seven years her senior).

From 2014 on, advent was marred by some deliberation over whether it was or wasn’t acceptable festive entertainment.

This was, it should be said, a largely online habit: Knightley (who later became known for her feminist principles) described Love, Actually as “obviously the greatest movie ever made” while on the promo trail for romcom Begin Again. When a study came out, the next February, called I Did It Because I Never Stopped Loving You: The Effects of Media Portrayals of Persistent Pursuit on Beliefs About Stalking, several media publications saw it as further evidence that the doorway scene was problematic.

By 2017, Lincoln – now a global star thanks to starring in zombie TV juggernaut The Walking Dead – had been practically forced to admit that his character hadn’t aged well. He also confessed – seemingly for the first time – that he was a bit sceptical from the off: “My big scene in the doorway felt so easy,” he told EW. “But I kept saying to Richard [Curtis], ‘Are you sure I’m not going to come off as a creepy stalker?’”

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EW also spoke to Curtis: “Retroactively, I’m aware that Andrew’s role was on the edge. But I think because Andrew was so open-hearted and guileless, we knew we’d get away with it.”

And, in some ways, they did: a survey done by EW in 2017 found that two-thirds of participants still see Lincoln’s character as love-struck sap rather than a stalker. The weirdness of the doorway scene was also dealt with fairly deftly in the 2018 Comic Relief special, in which Lincoln reveals (to Knightley, still happily married to Ejiofor) that he did, indeed, marry Kate Moss — one of the women he would have taken instead of her.

Does that make Love, Actually’s doorway scene an acceptable source for political canvassing? Probably not. But it’s probably a more deserving target – after all, nobody would want such a fate to befall The Muppets Christmas Carol.

(c) Telegraph

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