"Surreal, but nice."

Why the first 45 minutes of Notting Hill is a masterpiece

It’s amazing what can happen in 45 minutes. Arsenal can throw away the title at Bolton Wanderers, Iraqi military forces may or may not have been able to deploy chemical and biological weapons and your Windows operating system can decide — having just stumbled across an important meeting in your calendar — that it’s the perfect opportunity to run a thoroughly non-essential update.

But for me, Clive, UK productivity peaked on 27 April, 1999, when Notting Hill had its premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square. I’m by no means a Richard Curtis apologist — given the choice between watching Love Actually and spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap¹, I would opt for the latter, as being less painful². But Citizen Kane remains your generation’s Notting Hill.

Jokes per cubic centimetre

If the oft-quoted line about the Holy Roman Empire is that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire³, then the trouble with romcoms is that they are frequently neither romantic nor particularly comedic. Notting Hill, and in particular its first act and a half, is a glaring exception.

Watch an early season episode of The Simpsons and one is struck by its sheer compositional density. Even accounting for the Duff-tinted glasses, the high gag-per-minute ratio takes some acclimatising: the background signs that reward rewatching, the tight conversational rhythm, the cultural references stacked like 1950s diner pancakes.

Notting Hill achieves something similar, but over a longer period and with greater surface control. To listen to Hugh Grant’s diegetic narration, as his charming everyman William Thacker describes the ordinary goings on along Portobello Road, is to be carried along by a stream of acerbic asides, all framed within the tonal restraint of an ‘ordinary world’.

Notting Hill, London (Credit: needpix.com)

There is the usual cast of eccentrics that the English still like to believe marks them out as a nation, though in recent years this quality has tipped from charming to suspect. So we meet the adorably awkward assistant Martin and the greasy thief Rufus with the Cadogan Guide to Bali down his trousers (“Either wipe it and put it back, or buy it.”) Even Spike, the dishevelled and chaotic flatmate who in lesser hands would ordinarily break immersion, has an inherent earnestness.