Our current Movie of the Month, 1989’s Baby Cakes, is a made-for-TV romcom starring Ricki Lake as the world’s most adorable stalker.  It follows the exact narrative beats of the original 1985 German film it adapts, Sugarbaby, but it handles them with a much lighter, gentler touch.  In Sugarbaby, our lonely mortician protagonist has no friends or hobbies outside her obsessive scheming to sleep with the married man who catches her lustful eye.  It’s a much darker film than Baby Cakes tonally, but it’s also much more colorful, as it’s lit with enough candy-color gels to halfway convince you that it was directed by Dario Argento under a German pseudonym.  Baby Cakes sands off all the stranger, off-putting details of the original to instead deliver a familiar, cutesy romcom about a woman struggling with self-image issues as the world constantly taunts her for being overweight; Ricki Lake’s bubbly personality lifts the general mood of that story, as does the decision to make her object of desire an engaged man instead of a married one.  Even her stalking is played as an adorable quirk in 80s-romcom montage, as she tries on different disguises while tracking down her supposed soulmate.

One essential romcom element of Baby Cakes is the quirky circumstances of its star-couple’s professions.  Ricki Lake not only plays a mortician in this case; she’s the morgue’s designated beautician, livening up dead bodies with cheery glam makeup.  The hunk she stalks in the NYC subway system is not traveling to a boring desk job in some office cubicle somewhere; he’s the subway train conductor who drives her to work everyday, a much less common occupation.  Naturally, then, the NYC subway setting where she first lays eyes on him becomes a defining component of the film, affording it some novelty as a Public Transit Romcom instead of just a generic one.  It’s in the subways where she forces a meet-cute, where she flirts by buying him Sugar Babies at a vending machine, where she dresses like a mustachioed janitor to sneak a peek at his work schedule, etc.  That setting had me thinking a lot about public-transit romances as a result, so here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

The most adorable public-transit romcom I could find also involves some unethical scheming and lusting from afar by its female star, in this case Sandra Bullock instead of Ricki Lake.  Like in The Net, Bullock stars as an unloved schlub with no social life outside her relationship with her cat.  Her only romantic prospect is making cartoon-wolf eyes at a handsome businessman stranger (Peter Gallagher), whom she watches board the train for his morning commute with ritualistic devotion.  You see, her quirky romcom occupation is working the token booth for the Chicago L-Train system, which the movie specifies early in an opening credits sequence that features hotdog stands, Wrigley Field, and a Michael Jordan statue to establish locality.  It also ends on an image of Bullock riding the L-Train herself as a passenger instead of a booth worker, modeling a classic white wedding dress and a “JUST MARRIED” sign as if she had hired a limousine in the suburbs.

While You Were Sleeping doesn’t spend too much time on that train platform, though.  In an early scene, her mysterious would-be beau is mugged and falls unconscious onto the tracks, when she suddenly springs to action for the first time in her go-nowhere life and pulls his limp body to safety.  Much of the rest of the film is spent in hospital rooms and the newly comatose man’s family home as she hides her non-relationship with him by pretending to be his fiancée.  It’s a convoluted sitcom set-up that would lead to one doozy of a “Grandma, how did you meet Grandpa?” conversation by the time she makes a genuine romantic connection, but in terms of romcom logic it’s all relatively reasonable & adorable.  Notably, she is eventually proposed to through the plexiglass barrier of the train-platform tollbooth, with an engagement ring passed along as if it were token fare.  Cute!

On the Line (2002)

If you wish While You Were Sleeping had more emphasis on the novelty of its Chicago L-Train setting and are willing to give up little things like the movie being good or watchable, On the Line is the perfect public-transit romcom alternative.  In fact, that is the only case in which it is recommendable.  *NSYNC backup singers Lance Bass & Joey Fatone play boneheaded bros in the worst college-campus cover band you’ve ever heard.  While Fatone refuses to grow up after college (continuing to live out his rockstar fantasy by playing dive bars and wearing t-shirts that helpfully say “ROCK” on them), Bass gets a boring desk job at an ad agency, which means a lot of morning commutes on the L.  It’s on one of those trips to work when he strikes up a genuine connection with a fellow rider, chickens out when it’s time to ask for her number, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to complete the missed connection.  When they inevitably find each other a second time, it’s on the same train platform, where they once again flirtatiously bond by reciting Al Green song titles and the lineage of American presidents.  I am not kidding.

Do not ask me what happens between those two fateful meetings on the L, because I am not sure there is an answer.  In lieu of minor details like plot, themes, or jokes, On the Line is a collection of occurrences that pass time between train stops.  Besides a heroic third-act nut shot in which one of Bass’s idiot friends catches a baseball with his crotch at the aforementioned Wrigley Field, most of the “humor” of the film consists of characters reacting to non-events with softly sarcastic retorts like “Okayyyy,” “Well excuuuuuse me,” and “Ooooohhh that’s gotta hurt.”  Otherwise, it’s all just background noise meant to promote a tie-in CD soundtrack that features acts like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Vitamin C and, of course, *NSYNC (the rest of whom show up for a “hilarious” post-credits gag where they play flamboyantly gay hairdressers, to the movie’s shame).  Other on-screen corporate sponsorships include Reebok, Total Request Live, McDonalds, Chyna, and Al Green, the poor bastard.  And because Bass works at an ad agency, the movie even dares to include a conversation with his boss (Dave Foley, embarrassing himself alongside coworker Jerry Stiller) that cynically attempts to define the term “tween females” as a marketing demographic.  The main product being marketed to those tween females was, of course, Lance Bass himself, who comes across here as a not especially talented singer who’s terrified of women.  Hopefully they vicariously learned to love public transit in the process too, which I suppose is also advertised among all those corporate brands.  If nothing else, the romance is directly tied to the wonders of the L-Train by the time a character declares “Love might not make the world go round, but it’s what makes the ride worthwhile” to a car full of semi-annoyed passengers. 

Paterson (2016)

If you’re looking for a movie that’s both good and heavily public transit-themed, I’d recommend stepping slightly outside the romcom genre to take a ride with Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s zen slice-of-life drama starring Adam Driver.  Paterson may not technically be a romcom, but it is both romantic & comedic.  Driver leans into his surname by driving a city bus around his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, earning just enough of a decent living to pay for his eccentric wife’s art supplies.  His character’s first name also happens to be Paterson, which is one of many amusing coincidences that become quietly surreal as they recur: seeing twins around town, hearing repeated lines of dialogue, and striking up conversations with strangers who happen to be practicing poets.  You see, Paterson is not only a bus driver, no more than Sandra Bullock’s lovelorn protagonist was only a tollbooth worker or Lance Bass was only a mediocre singer.  He’s also an amateur poet who spends his alone time between bus rides writing work he never intends to publish, poems that are only read by his adoring wife.  It’s all very aimless & low-stakes, but it’s also very lovely.

I generally find Jarmusch’s “I may be a millionaire but I’m still an aimless slacker at heart” schtick to be super irritating. However, as a former poetry major who rides the bus to work every day and whose biggest ambition in life is to write on the clock, I can’t be too too annoyed in this case.  If nothing else, Paterson gets the act of writing poetry correct in a way that few movies do.  It’s all about revising the same few lines over & over again until they’re exactly correct; it’s also all about the language of imagery.  Paterson gets the humble appeal of riding the city bus right too, even if it is a little idealistic about how pleasant & clean the bus itself and the conversations eavesdropped on it tend to be (speaking as a person of NORTA experience). While You Were Sleeping & Baby Cakes have the most adorable use of their public-transit settings on this list; On the Line has the most absurd.  For its part, Paterson just has the most.  There are a lot of quiet, contemplative bus rides as the movie peacefully rolls along, which is the exact kind of energy I try to bring to my morning commute every day.

-Brandon Ledet