The box art is deceptive. Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino in "fun, frisky" mini-dresses cuddling each other and kicking up their heels. "The Blonde Leading the Blonde" runs the tagline. Because being blonde is some kind of impairment.
Nearly 30 years on, it would be easy to assume that this is a dumb valley-girl chick flick – but look again.
Actually, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion is a subversive feminist masterpiece. It's a movie which both honours and transcends its genre, and is easily as meta, intelligent and groundbreaking as Scream was for the horror genre one year prior.
If Scream upended the stalk 'n slash sub-genre by rewriting its rules, so Romy and Michele does with chick flicks, and in particular the Pygmalion subgenre (where, basically, a romantic diamond in the rough is given a polish).
Unfortunately Romy and Michele was just too damn subtle for its own good – but at least it is now finally getting the sequel it deserves.
Written by Robin Schiff (a former member of comedy troupe The Groundlings) and directed by The Simpsons mainstay David Mirkin, Romy and Michele began as characters in a play by Schiff called Ladies Room.
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It's clear from the opening beats this isn't going to be a standard rom-com. We open with 'I'm Just a Girl' by No Doubt playing on the soundtrack, with a clip from Pretty Woman in the background, then: "You know, even though we've watched Pretty Woman like, 36 times, I never get tired of making fun of it," says Kudrow's Michele Weinberger.
"Aw, look, poor thing – they won't let her shop. Yeah – like those salesgirls in Beverly Hills aren't bigger whores than she is," says Romy White (Oscar winner Sorvino).
With the approach of their 10-year high school reunion, the duo decide that they need to lose weight, get boyfriends and great jobs to prove to their old school frenemies they're a success. But when their quick-fix life makeover fails, they decide to fake it. They dress like "business women", borrow a car, buy a cell phone and pretend they invented Post-Its.
It's an inversion of My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman and She's All That, where the untamed women are refined, empowered and ultimately improved.
In Romy and Michele, their plan fails and they're embarrassed for a time in front of the 'A-group', before finally learning that they were fine as they were, that the A-group don't matter, that boyfriends aren't important and that being friends with each other and having a laugh is a perfectly legitimate life choice.
It inverts the genre myth so much that, in one dream sequence, Michele meets her former nerdy suitor Sandy and discovers he's actually had a face transplant as 'a gift to himself' ("you really chose a good one!" says Michele).
Perhaps the message isn't that profound on paper, but the delivery really was – snappy, surreal, satirical with a banging soundtrack, packed with period detail, quotable lines and stand-out set pieces (the three-way dance routine to Cyndi Lauper's 'Time after Time' is magnificent).
At heart, it's not a wildly different message from, say, It's a Wonderful Life, albeit with a strongly feminist twist. And like It's a Wonderful Life, it contains a flash-forward of an alt-future dystopia – but the true horror here is that Romy and Michele aren't friends any more.
Romy and Michele came out a year before Sex and the City, a wildly-popular show encouraging women to choose whether they were more like ball-busting careerist Miranda, shoe-fetishist and serial monogamist Carrie, nympho Samantha or home-maker Charlotte.
Romy and Michele screams: none! And all! The whole concept of women "having it all" in relation to a bunch of societal expectations is nonsense, and Romy and Michele treats it as such by taking the piss. "Nice suit, is it an Armani?" Romy says, while trying to bag them perfect boyfriends. She's impressed until she finds out she's talking to a suit salesman.
The reunion is a bust, a perfect confluence of what happens to high-school groups when you're not in high school any more. When Romy finally meets her former crush, now married to the queen bee alpha, she learns he's an alcoholic and their marriage is a sham. The high-school nerd is now the most successful member of the class, having actually invented something. And everyone made someone else at school miserable, whether they knew it or not.
But this goes way beyond Never Been Kissed high school nostalgia. People talk about Alien's Ripley as being one of the few true feminist characters in mainstream film. They clearly haven't seen Romy and Michele.
Despite multiple opportunities, Romy and Michele are never "made safe" – they remain powerfully independent to the end. Romy rejects her former crush as he once did to her. And when Michele's potential love-interest asks her to dance, she agrees only if Romy can dance with them.
They don't gain acceptance from the A-group, they just learn to genuinely not care. "What the hell is your problem, Christie? Why the hell are you always such a nasty bitch?" says Romy in one of the most awesomely rousing calls to arms ever.
"I mean, okay, so Michele and I did make up some stupid lie! We only did it because we wanted you to treat us like human beings. But you know what I realised? I don't care if you like us, 'cause we don't like you. You're a bad person with an ugly heart, and we don't give a flying f**k what you think!"
Hooray!
Of the Valley-girl sub-genre, Clueless and Mean Girls get far more credit. But neither are so ferociously female, nor as funny. Bridesmaids is hailed as a breakthrough female comedy, and while it is at heart a story about female friendships, it's also steeped in romance and marriage. Romy and Michele's romance is with each other. Girl meets girl, girl loses girl, girl gets girl back, girls fly off in a helicopter.
And it's not about sex either.
Romy: Swear to God, sometimes I wish I was a lesbian.
Michele: Do you want to try to have sex some time just to see if we are?
Romy: What? Yeah, right, Michelle. Just the idea of having sex with another woman creeps me out. But if we're not married by the time we're 30, ask me again.
Like with horror, there can sometimes be a reluctance to see comedy, and particularly female-led comedy, as high art. And for timing/box-art/tagline and whatever other reasons, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion has somehow been overlooked.
But look again. Or don't. After all, these are two true modern feminist heroines who don't give a flying f**k what you think.
Romy & Michele's High School Reunion is available to watch now on Disney+.
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