For a Christmas film, Love Actually has fuck all festive food in it. It’s miles away from The Muppets Christmas Carol, with its bounteous turkey dinner shots and singing bunches of grapes. Nor does it have the iconic pizza scene of Home Alone. It can’t even match Buddy the Elf’s spaghetti covered in maple syrup and M&M’s, which doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas but is made by an elf so, by proxy, counts as Christmas food. It is, despite all its other Christmassy constituents, a barren wasteland when it comes to festive food.
Despite the emblematic decadence of the Christmas meal and all its related joys—mince pies, the Pret Christmas sandwich, that weird fruitcake your colleague makes every year that you feel obliged to try—Love Actually eschews any culinary references. The 2003 film, which is directed by Richard Curtis and follows ten different characters in the run-up to Christmas, builds towards a climactic Christmas Eve that sees the Prime Minister neck on with a girl in a primary school hall. Throughout the film, we get glittering Oxford Street, a children’s nativity play, a Christmas office party, present-giving, a goddamn two-minute-seven-second gift-wrapping scene, and yet not one shot of a Christmas dinner.
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There’s barely a mince pie until Christmas Eve. One can only presume that Curtis was coked off his tits during the writing of the film, bathing in the success of Notting Hill (which, btw, has numerous dinner party scenes), or that no one ate Christmas food in 2003.
Despite Curtis’ desire to kill Christmas with this frankly insulting oversight, I felt it my duty to offer a deep analysis of the food—or lack thereof—in Love Actually. To tell you the truth (because at Christmas, you tell the truth), I didn’t realise that the film had such a dearth of food-related scenes when I originally devised the idea, but it seems crucial that this mystery be solved. What was the food that characterised these ten weaving storylines of Christmas love? Why had no one ever delved into the crucial issue? Was I really going to write an entire piece about chocolate digestives?
Yes. The answer is yes.
Love Actually opens at Heathrow airport. We watch unsuspecting strangers from afar as they hug their relatives, unaware that are tacitly being used as free fodder for a Christmas film. There’s no food in this bit.
We then cut to Bill Nighy as pop star Billy Mack (no food), Colin Firth about to get cheated on by his girlfriend (still no food), and Liam Neeson crying because his wife died. It is here that we first witness anything food-related—and it’s a lobster reference. It should also be noted that Emma Thompson holds a pepper at this point.
But it’s not until Kris Marshall as hapless catering worker Colin Frissell enters the scene that we see any real food-based action. “Best sandwiches in Britain,” he says, wandering around an office delivering snacks. “Try my lovely nuts. A beautiful muffin for a beautiful lady.” That’s it. That’s the extent of the food chat. Not, “Here’s a mince pie,” or “Something festive?” No, just some lewd euphemisms, borderline sexual harassment, and a basic development of his character as someone who works in food delivery.
Frissell’s work in our food journey doesn’t stop here, alas. Next, we get the iconic “dead baby’s finger” moment, as he attempts to chirpse a wedding caterer by telling her how bad she is at her job. From this, we learn that Frissell is so bad at chatting to women that he must extradite himself to the US, and that even in a late November wedding, no one is serving Christmas food.
And then there’s the chocolate digestive moment, which sees Martine McCutcheon woo the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom over a biscuit. “I was hoping you’d win,” she says. “Not that I wouldn’t have been nice to him too … just always given him the boring biscuits with no chocolate.” Totally devoid of Christmas cheer and relevance, but smooth as fuck.
OK, fine, maybe it’s early days—it’s only five weeks until Christmas at this point. Let’s fast forward to one of the creepiest scenes in modern film history, in which Keira Knightley’s character discovers a secret wank tape that the guy from the Walking Dead has made of her face. Arriving at his house, two weeks before Christmas, she comes to reconcile their differences—over a banoffee pie.
Now, excuse me for being stupid, but are we really to believe that Knightley was wandering around London with a banoffee pie in mid-December? No, of course not, because there is only one pie she’d buy at this time of year—wank video or no wank video—and that would be a bloody mince pie.
Towards the end of the film, we come tantalisingly close to getting an actual food scene when Colin Firth turns up at a restaurant to declare his love for his former housekeeper. It seems that only the uncomfortable moments in Love Actually get to be about food: Firth arrives unannounced to propose to a woman he has never spoken to, but offered 5 percent of his book earnings to and gave a lift home to a few times. Perhaps in Marseilles where everyone speaks Portuguese, there are different Christmas traditions, but don’t most of Europe celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve? So, why are they all out having dinner? It makes literally no sense and also is devoid of Christmas cheer.
Love Actually might have solved the class divide via a romance between the Prime Minister and his catering manager, and kept turtlenecks eternally relevant, but when it comes to food, this is one Christmas film that really misses a trick.
Probably try less coke next time, Richard?
