Criticism | Christmas crush – Netflix’s gay romantic Christmas comedy brings a cute cliché story

It’s finally arrived that time of year when fans of Christmas movies revel in the arrival of dozens of new streaming platforms for all tastes on the streaming platforms. Of course, most movies and series are still based on the clichés and binarism of the male-female novel, however, in recent years there have been a growing number of productions focusing on non-binary and non-heterogeneous relationships, including including the release ‘A Crush For Christmas’, this year’s new release on Netflix whose motto, for a change, is gay Christmas romance.

Peter (Michael Urie) works with fashion photo campaigns, but although he is successful in his work in Los Angeles, he is unlucky in love. After a frustrated Christmas party, during which he finds out that his current boyfriend was already engaged, he decides to spend the holiday season with his family in upstate New Hampshire. Even more: he decides to call his best friend, Nick (Philemon Chambers) to pose as his new partner, even though his family already knows him. What the two weren’t expecting was that Peter’s mother (Kathy Najimy) had scheduled a blind date for her son with handsome James (Luke Macfarlane), and now Peter will have to decide. where his heart will live.

Taking up the classic romantic comedy concept “I’m bringing my new boyfriend home to meet my family at the end of the year,” “A Crush For Christmas” is full of the shots we love the most, so we can anticipating the lines and actions of the characters and, even so, we follow the plot with that taste of hot chocolate mixed with marshmallow – in other words, it’s a movie with lots and lots of sugar.

Despite this, the construction of Chad Hodge’s script leads the viewer to head in a direction which, although well elaborated, is then thrown to the ground, just to be able to follow the cliché, losing a good chance to innovate the genre and present something. different. This choice of director Michael Mayer, please, is also restrictive and goes against a key that the film has been hitting for an hour and forty: that one cannot assume that from the mere fact that a man is gay, he automatically becomes an expert on a particular subject, as if his life was reserved for only one option. On the contrary, this construction is corroborated by three abrupt cuts in the edition, which abruptly closes a scene and changes the core at an accelerated rate, so as not to postpone the novel in progress or to have to give satisfaction on themes that ‘he does. not want to linger.

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In fact, ‘A Crush For Christmas’ is a very light romantic comedy, without big questions, and which can be watched by the whole family from the age of 10 or 12. It’s a movie that shows how much better and better we feel when we are close to the core that gives us security and comfort in this world, and how good it is to have people around us who give us love and support our happiness. In other words, it’s a typical family Christmas movie.

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