You've Got Mail and the Other Adaptations of Parfumerie

One of the hallmarks of romantic comedies is the story of the squabbling lovers. We love to see tales of two people who bicker and argue for a long time, and eventually, they learn to see that deep down they actually love one another. It harkens to the childhood notion of a crush, where people will often say that someone is picking on a particular person because they like them and don't know how to express it. Is that a particularly healthy or productive way to form a relationship? Absolutely not, but seeing the clearly definable growth of the romantic leads satisfies our dramatic wants perfectly. This relationship dynamic was ripe for plucking in the age of the screwball comedies of old Hollywood, in pictures like Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night and remained a central tenet of the genre ever since. One story, in particular, Hollywood has returned to several times over the years stands as arguably the archetypical ideal of this story structure, and that is the play Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklós László.