Main Task Research

Codes and Conventions of the Romance Genre

The genre of films that I am analysing is Romance. Typically the romance genre is aimed towards a female audience because it is known that females are, stereo typically, more emotional within relationships than men. The mise-en-scene of any film is vital, and in a romance films you can expect to see soft and relatively natural lighting from whichever lights are present in the shot, to achieve the feelings of the film being in touch with reality, making the story as believable as possible. The music of a romance film is also very important as a common icon of a romance film is the soft tender music, to represent how sensitivity and tenderness of the relationship. The music is key in the film because it creates the mood and suspense, and ultimately gives the film its feel.

Romance films are commonly set in the city, typically big cities such as New York. Perhaps this is a typical setting because the city represents endless opportunities and having anything you could want, which also allows the characters to have a particular lifestyle and personality. In the romance genre there are a few common props that you can expect to see throughout the film, such as some sort of flowers or gifts that could be given from one love interest to another, simply to represent love and romantic emotions.

In virtually any romance film, there will be two main characters who are typically a male and a female, being each other's love interests. Many films within the genre have the "boy meets girl" scenario, in which hints are given throughout the film that the two people may be a good match for each other and that they ultimately should end up together. Of course, a film about two people falling in love with each other still needs to be realistic, so that the viewers can relate to the characters through the real life troubles of a relationship, and so for this reason, most romance films will present the couple having rows and fights. In many of these films there will be a character that disrupts the relationship, and characters will usually go their separate ways because of an argument that the couple had, but these splits between the couple are mainly temporarily because the characters will typically find their way back to one another, so the story fulfils the happy ending that the viewers wanted.


1) The Notebook 

2) La La Land

3) Dirty Dancing

4) A Walk To Remember

5) Pretty Woman

Audience Expectations for these Films

The audience watching these romance films expect to see two main characters, typically male and female, fall in love with each other over a period of time after sharing information about each other's lives, and getting to know each other very well. Typically, the audience will expect to see a difference in the two main character's social classes or wealthiness, which happens to be the case for almost all of these films (some more than others), but this isn't the case all of the time. The audience of a romance film will expect to see the  two main characters having some form of difficulty which causes the couple to part temporarily, some longer than others, but then come back together because their love was stronger than their row. This occurs in almost every famous romance film out there, and we can see this in all of these films, but again, some more than others. For example, the parting of Noah and Allie in The Notebook is much more prominent than the fight between Edward and Vivian in Pretty Woman. In the films where social classes are particularly relevant and an important difficulty within the story, the audience will expect to see the couple overcome and dismiss their social differences or their differences in wealth, which occurs in the films here such as Dirty Dancing and Pretty Woman. The audience will always expect to see a happy ending in a romance film, however this isn't always the case for all romance films. Some films in the romance genre have unexpected tragedies, such as A Walk To Remember, as no one would've expected the tragic plot twist of Jamie being terminally ill. Although Jamie, one of the two main characters, passes due to her illness, the ending of the film is still in a way positive as she got to be married to her love before she passed, and even after she passed, Landon would still visit her grave often and in the end she made him a better person. We can also see a happy ending in an unexpected way in La La Land, as although Mia and Sebastian don't end up together in the end, they both end up happy by achieving their dreams, so in this case, their romantic ties were sacrificed so they could achieve the best versions of themselves, which really is a happy ending when it is thought about. Overall, the audience will always expect to see love coming out of the most unexpected places, which is definitely clear in almost every romance film in the genre.