Sleepless In Seattle is an ode to cinematic romance – the kind of silver screen love that is built on yearning glances, captured in dreamy, soft backlighting, and set to a score of swelling violins.

A homage to the 1957 Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr romance An Affair To Remember, which was, in turn, a remake of the 1939 film Love Affair, Sleepless In Seattle was already an echo of a distant cinematic past upon its release 30 years ago.

At its helm was director Nora Ephron, who was, at the time, already garnering a reputation for shaking up the formula of the ‘romantic’ film having penned the groundbreaking When Harry Met Sally four years earlier. 

Meg Ryan stars as Annie, a go-get-em reporter from Baltimore, while Tom Hanks plays Sam, a recently widowed architect living with his son in Seattle. When Annie hears Sam discussing his grief on the radio, she becomes fixated with him. Eventually, she writes him a letter, asking him to meet her on top of the Empire State Building, a move borrowed from An Affair To Remember, her favourite film. 

Following in the thematic footsteps of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless is, in many ways, an enquiry into the cultural divide between men and women. In When Harry Met Sally, Ephron’s examination plays out largely in the form of her character’s conversations. “Women are very practical,” Sally says. Later, in response to another question, Harry offers: “Sure. All men think that.” 

In Sleepless In Seattle, the gender divide is explored through what women and men watch.

Annie and her best friend, Becky (Rosie O’Donnell), watch An Affair to Remember – a lot. They curl up in their pyjamas, eat popcorn and mouth along to the schmaltzy lines, tears in their eyes. “Men never get this movie,” says a weepy Becky. Later, after Annie has invited Sam on her An Affair To Remember-inspired meeting on the Empire State Building, his sister Suzy (Rita Wilson) instantly recognises the reference. She proceeds to deliver an increasingly tearful account of the film’s romantic conclusion. The iconic monologue was partially improvised by Wilson. She later told Entertainment Weekly: “When somebody tells something about a movie, they always want to go into more detail than you want to know, so I thought that would’ve been a funny sort of thing.… I love that that stayed in the movie, that Nora kept it.”

The continuing thread of An Affair To Remember in Sleepless suggests that women who have never met all have a shared emotional language that is rooted in the magical romance of cinema.

“An Affair To Remember is a kind of fantastic, weepy, woman’s movie in not necessarily a good sense of a woman’s movie,” Ephron told Turner Classic Movies. “It’s really kind of hooking into those pathetic female fantasies.”

She continued: “What we were trying to do in Sleepless was to hook into a completely different romantic fantasy, which was what if there’s one perfect person for me somewhere out there and I never find him.”

To hit this point home, after Wilson’s monologue, Sam simply states, nonplussed: “That’s a chick’s movie,” before he and Suzy’s husband (Victor Garber) proceed to weep over the ‘boys’ movie’, The Dirty Dozen.

“You can’t imagine the movie without [the scene], it is so totally what Sleepless is about,” Ephron said, describing Wilson and Hanks’s respective movie-inspired tearful monologues. “I was just trying to tap into the kind of basic romantic yearning that will make people as dopey as a good romantic movie can make people.”

The implication, of course, is that women and men can never really enjoy the same films – that women are, by nature, drawn to emotional love stories, while men are only interested in films that feature other men throwing grenades. Even Ephron called An Affair To Remember “a woman’s movie”. As countless lines in When Harry Met Sally indicate, she did believe in an essential discrepancy of taste between the sexes. And, of course, in her later romcom, You’ve Got Mail, starring the same two leads, Ryan’s character asks Hanks’s character: “What is it with men and The Godfather?” 

However, what’s fascinating about Sleepless In Seattle is that Ephron not only acknowledges but also pokes fun at the cultural stereotype of the “girl movie”; she subtly undermines it also. In fact, the entire film plays with the concept of gendered films and, in a meta sort of way, turns it on its head. 

The movie is about how women perceive love thanks to the movies they watch. “You want to be in love in a movie,” Becky tells Annie as they swoon over Cary Grant. It is what Ephron referred to as a “pathetic female fantasy”. However, unlike the so-called woman’s movie that Annie and Becky spend the entire film obsessing over, Sleepless doesn’t follow the classic “chick’s movie” formula. Instead, it complicates it and questions it.

Annie and Sam’s romance plays out on opposite ends of the country. In turn, the film is less about their love story and more about the idea of romance altogether. While Ephron manages to recreate the magic connection with another person, the film is in many ways a philosophical reflection on the dichotomy between real love and movie love.

Ultimately, Ephron seems to conclude that we ought to celebrate the power of cinema to create that kind of magical romance, reducing us to weepy puddles. After all, for many men, films like The Dirty Dozen have the same effect. Both ‘types’ of film hinge on fantasy, escapism and grand emotion – and isn’t that what all of our favourite guilty pleasure movies do best?  

Oddly enough, the cultural debate about ‘boy movies’ and ‘girl movies’ rages on 30 years after the release of Sleepless. And in many ways, our perception of gendered film viewing seems to be more reductive and regressive than ever.

Just take the recent (ironic?) tweet that read: “Girls need boyfriends because they show them movies. Otherwise they’d never watch any.”

The implication is, to put it simply, that men are cinephiles, while women watch trash. When they do deign to watch a movie, it’s probably something pointless and mushy like An Affair To Remember or Sleepless In Seattle. 

It’s been 30 years since Sleepless In Seattle tackled the concept of gendered film viewing and illustrated that women are, in fact, not ‘worse’ than men when it comes to their viewing habits. Though the film may be decades old, it understood something about films that many people today can’t seem to wrap their heads around: yes, we may like Cary Grant and Nora Ephron more than some men do. But to suggest that women only watch romantic films is, quite frankly, misogynistic and extremely reductive. Nora would probably shoot back, “Yes, but your guilty pleasure movies aren’t that good either, are they?” The fact that Sleepless takes on the idea of the ‘girl movie’ with a sense of nuance and wit is in itself a sign that the film and indeed the genre as a whole is too often written off as ‘girly’. In fact, believe it or not, lots of men like Nora Ephron too.

While it may be true that Ephron’s legacy as one of the greatest romcom directors of the 90s means she is often associated with ‘girl movies’, her own work takes a much more nuanced approach to the concept and reminds us that romance should never be written off.

Images: Sony Pictures