ABSTRACT
In this chapter I devote attention to one of the ways in which romance in recent American cinema is implicated with the fantasy transcendence of US borders. Attending to the emergence of a set of films that centralize a narrative of Europeanization, I argue that these texts constitute an important new permutation of the woman’s film in the 1990s. Films such as Only You (1994), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), French Kiss (1995), The Matchmaker (1997), and Notting Hill (1999) are bound together by a codified set of narrative protocols which include, for instance, the reluctant or accidental arrival of the protagonist in a nation in Western Europe, the discovery within that national setting of new possibilities for coupling and family formation, and the narrow averting of a return to the US by the heroine, who is instead inscribed within a “happy ending” achievable because of her symbolic acquisition of a foreign nationality.
