Amanda Peterson

(In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) If teenage rom-com Can’t Buy Me Love feels so familiar, I’m guessing it’s as much for how it whole-heartedly embraces the most familiar clichés of the high school romance genre as for how it’s been imitated later on by a slew of similar films. Here we have the usual buzzwords and tropes: jocks-versus-nerds, sensitive teenagers writing poetry, fake-pretence love turning real, social ostracism as the overriding value, etc. In other words, it feels incredibly predictable and familiar even when it’s not too badly handled. Much of the lingering trouble, seen almost twenty-five years later, had to do with the film’s refusal to even acknowledge its own limitations in playing high school social status-seeking straight: more recent similar films would poke at their own assumptions. But Can’t Buy Me Love doesn’t – it’s as conventional as you can imagine and that does take away from the decent work by the actors, the straightforward narrative rhythm and its basic likability. Patrick Dempsey and Amanda Peterson do rather well as the lead couple, which saves the film from further indignities. Not all high school movies are created equal, obviously, and 1980s ones don’t have the perspective that later examples benefit from.