'Honey, how I hate you': when adapting a romantic 'best seller' does not provoke love on screen

2022-11-19T11:01:14.952Z

The novel by Canadian Sally Thorne has sold six million copies worldwide in times when romanticism is not in fashion

Romanticism is not in fashion, but

Honey, How I Hate You,

a novel by Canadian Sally Thorne, has sold six million copies worldwide.

They are the eternal contradictions of the market, the media and even sociology, those that are in charge of confirming that life and leisure do not have a single path, but many.

And that some of them can be hateful to the contrary.

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In fact, to refute the literary data, and establish a new contradiction, romantic comedies, a classic genre since the

screwball comedies

of the thirties, with more or less vitriol, with greater or lesser doses of sugar, have almost disappeared from billboards. .

In the eighties, nineties and beginnings of this century it was released three or four times a month.

Now the (late) arrival of the film version of Thorpe's novel becomes almost an anomaly because the genre seems to have crossed over into a television series format.

The promotion of sappy, naive and refreshing romanticism as always, although from the sofa at home.

Honey, How Much I Hate You

is a textbook romantic comedy that draws its essence from that rancid and dangerous expression that he had affirmed as a mantra since we were children that "those who fight love each other."

Here, under the office;

Specifically, in a large publishing house, a consequence of the merger of two others and united to get out of the crisis, but with radically opposite objectives and ways of acting: one of them, of attachment to great literature;

the other, of nonsense that sells like hotcakes.

One more contradiction.

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The film directed by Peter Hutchings starts fatally.

The first half hour is infamous in its presentation of characters: monotonous, with bad texts, with hardly any dialogues, only with laughable hate games between the protagonists, each of them emblematic of the two ways of acting of this double-sided editorial.

However, as the unresolved sexual tension ends up turning towards erotic fire, first, and then towards true affection and the beginning of the relationship, the story improves.

At least, to gradually become a romantic comedy of all time, the discreet and forgettable kind, yes, but not the horror that its first third pointed to.

It would not have been bad at all if in a movie set around books they had more presence, and with a greater depth than that of a couple of self-help messages, a breakfast cup with the motto "reading is sexy" and a couple of weak jokes about Mephistopheles and reading

War and Peace

at twelve years old.

But, on the other hand, in the phase of love (and not hate) between the couple, there is a stupendous sequence at a wedding thanks to a beautiful public declaration of admiration from her for him, blurted out to her fierce would-be father-in-law and based on something very true: love causes the other, by your side, to be better every day in all aspects.

And, why fool ourselves, the leading performers, Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell, are gorgeous, sexy, and there is good chemistry between them.

And this, for fans of the genre, is indeed essential.