Earlier this autumn, long before the pitch call for this Christmas edition of CYZ landed in my inbox, while absentmindedly scrolling through TikTok I came across a video by user @livgrace_x with the caption “If you live in liverpool.. wait for the end …”. A film is playing on a laptop screen, shot, along with the whole keyboard for some reason, slightly out of focus, and an onscreen caption reads “So I found this Christmas movie. Which is set in MAINE (wait for it)”.
The film is Deck the Heart (2021), an extremely low budget Christmas film in the Hallmark model and so follows all the usual beats: a man in the big city forced to return to the small town he grew up in to host a family Christmas (in this case, it’s due to a strange stipulation in a dead grandfather’s will), and he falls in love with the event planner he hires to help pull off the big day. The only real deviation from what we expect, at least for me, is the appearance of Al Sapienza, who plays Mikey Palmice in ten episodes of The Sopranos, in a minor supporting role as the small town lawyer in charge of executing the (odd) terms of this will.
And so the film plays out: a middlingly generically handsome white man with a stylish “business” haircut is stopped by a fireman who, in a stilted manner that suggests it might be his first and last time on the silver (tv) screen, advises him that they are waiting on a tow truck to move debris from the road – and that he might be best passing the time in the local strip mall.
Bearing in mind this film is, as @livgrace_x was keen to highlight, set in rural Maine, the dissolve transition into stock footage of Liverpool’s Lord Street, followed by Liverpool One shopping centre is something of a shock to the system, even for those not from or familiar with the city. Liverpool often appears on screen, doubling for London in Peaky Blinders (2013-22), New York in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), and Gotham City in The Batman (2022). If you know when and where to look, you can spot it, and enjoy Bruce Wayne swan-diving off the Liver Building. It’s chameleonic, adaptable, elastic city but one whose own cinematic history has its own rich seam from the beginning of cinema. In 1896 Alexandre Promio filmed Liverpool Scenes (1896) for the Lumiere Brothers, showing the architecture of a thriving city at the end of the 19th century, the bustling docks and the Overhead Railway, long since demolished.
There are no immediately recognisable Liverpool landmarks in Deck the Heart that would locate it precisely for someone not familiar with the city, but there’s a clear jump from a small lakeside town in Maine to what is clearly the built up centre of a city. Pedestrians walk quickly past a Home Bargains, a H&M, and The Perfume Shop on streets without snow or a single Christmas decoration. It’s footage that belongs in the background of a news broadcast as a journalist tries to explain inflation increases, not a Christmas film set nearly three thousand miles away. It’s not the only use of wildly unrelated stock footage in Deck the Heart, which at one point tries to pass off what appears to be a huge lake somewhere in Italy as part of the town, but it is the one that feels the most disconcerting.
Hallmark Christmas films are a distinctly North American phenomenon – unashamedly optimistic, aspirational in their depiction of Christmas celebrations only troubled by minor plot diversions, and for which (largely) heterosexual coupledom is the ultimate aim. Careers are put on hold or abandoned all together for the sake of rekindling old romances or fledgling new ones, characters return to the towns they grew up in and embrace the true spirit of Christmas – usually focused around throwing the perfect ball, town celebration or simply an extended Christmas dinner with all the recognisable (acceptably palatable) oddballs. They exist in the dichotomy between cities and small towns, fast-paced corporate lifestyles and quaint homely traditions, high-flying careers and cozy comforts.
It’s something that never rings true in any Hallmark (or Hallmark adjacent) film taking place in Britain; where there’s an allergy to sincerity, an underlying cynicism that is the antithesis of the Hallmark film. The most successful – and time honoured – British Christmas film is Love Actually, in which one of the many plotlines revolves around an emotional affair and the breakdown of trust in a marriage that is never really resolved, even in the saccharine airport finale. It adds a layer of unease, a jolt of cold, uncomfortable reality to go alongside, to allow, the unrelenting happy ending. This isn’t something a Hallmark film would dare touch.
If only there were more British Christmas films that actually feel like they take place in a realistic version of this country. They wouldn’t be exactly Hallmark, but still slightly, unbearably cringe. The kind of film you put on tipsy, late at night or while you’re putting up decorations. I want a Christmas film set in Liverpool: characters from rival companies going on chaotic work dos at Woody’s, bonding over bad renditions of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’; falling in love as they try to avoid the red and blue outfitted Santas running through the city. I want fake snow on Crosby Beach and emotional declarations of love in Liverpool John Lennon airport.
Or how about another tried and tested Hallmark formula: a career woman forced to leave the big city (Birmingham) to return to her small town (somewhere in the Black Country a few miles down the road) to truly learn the meaning of Christmas. She has to organise the town’s celebrations, the big light switch on attended by the mayor – who no-one recognises or even knows because town mayors have little to no power here – and someone who recently appeared on Britain’s Got Talent.
The Nativity! series comes the closest to creating the British Hallmark film. The first,released in 2009 and starring a pre-Sherlock Martin Freeman, was set and filmed mostly in Coventry, eschewing a romance-driven narrative for one set around bringing back the meaning of Christmas to a bitter primary school teacher. The following sequels included more established, reliably good actors – David Tennant, Jason Watkins, Celia Imrie – and a reliance on increasingly inconceivable plotlines and wildly diminishing returns on reviews and box office success. That’s not an issue shared by the Hallmark films, as they find their home on a dedicated TV channel in the US, and don’t even try to attract big name stars.
What does bring the Nativity! series in line with the Hallmark tradition is the aspirational plots, but they’re much more modest and suitably British. Whether it’s an underfunded school going up against its privately funded rivals, or a nervous teacher trying to upstage a successful older sibling, we are always on the side of the underdogs, willing them to win in unlikely, but not entirely inconceivable, circumstances. And so we’re happy to suspend our disbelief if, as in a Hallmark film, there is always a happy ending, always a perfect Christmas celebration. Even if they’re set in Coventry instead of snowy Maine.
The arc of the Brit-mark renaissance could follow in footsteps of the Nativity! Series – reasonable success, an immediate one-upping of the stakes, sharp decline, and eventually, maybe, a critical reappraisal in an online film magazine years in the future. I still want fun, and romance, and a plot daft enough to wrap your presents to, but with a tinge of melancholy; a toned down Eastenders’ Christmas episode with softer lighting and red and green colour schemes. I think it would do us all good.
Despite an allergy to wholehearted sincerity in our own Christmas output, Hallmark films, along with their bigger budget cousin the Netflix original, are increasingly popular in Britain, and irregardless of the reality of life in America, it is the imagined distance between it and Britain allows it a dreamlike power over the British imagination. Soft-focused, unabashed optimism and tooth-achingly sweet romances just don’t work in a country so committed to its own misery.
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