Leap Year trailer analysis

The film ‘Leap Year’ from 2010 is a Romantic Comedy starring Amy Adams.

The reason why this is a Romantic Comedy film is because it’s about a girl trying to get to her boyfriend who had to go to Dublin. This is what you would expect from this kind of genre, with a girl trying to find love, with a happy ending. An example of iconography is the earing’s that Amy Adams character receives of her boyfriend before he heads of to Dublin.

The use of narrative codes are things like enigma codes, an example of this that we see in the trailer is ‘will she marry him?’ and ‘who will she pick?’. There is also an example of action codes as well when they kiss on the table, this moves the story along.

The trailer is both restricted and omniscient, it is restricted because we don’t know what’s going to happen with who she will choose at the end of the trailer but it is also omniscient because we are with the girl throughout the film, so in a way we know what she’s going through.

Examples of ‘Propp’ is the hero is the girl and the princess is love that she wants with a man, whether it is her boyfriend or the welsh man that she meets that tries to help her get to Dublin.

With the use of Todorov’s theory, first of all the equilibrium is that she wants to get married, the disruption is that she doesn’t and she thinks she’s going to Dublin to see her boyfriend but ends up in Wales. The realism is her meeting the welsh man that helps her, then the attempt to repair is that she falls in love with the welsh man and finally the equilibrium is she finds love.

The use of technical and audio codes is the upbeat soundtrack which is quite familiar if you do watch Romantic Comedy’s, because you do expect a pop soundtrack from this type of genre. There is a use of bright lighting throughout the trailer that we see, and again, this is what you expect because a Romantic Comedy isn’t a dark film were you would see a dark lighting.

I think that the film is very stereotyped because Britain is shown as muddy fields in Wales and people that are drunk like the Irish.