Tell us your favourite romantic films, and win our critics' top 20

We get the films we deserve. Today’s films, made by men for men – the industry’s target audience being males between 14 and 29 – echo the age. Noisy, full of bangs, crashes and special effects, no lingering kisses, little talk of love. No romance. Now that we can see everything on the porn channels why wait to get to the point? Why beat about the bush? Johnny Depp can look at a girl with soulful eyes, but you know he’s laughing at her. What romance there is, is tongue-in-cheek.

How can it be otherwise? True romance concerns itself with helpless women controlling strong men by the power of love, and women no longer want to be helpless, and men no longer need to be strong. Machines do it for them. And as for love, what’s it all about? A neurotic dependency, a serotonin buzz, a charge of unsafe chemicals to the brain? If an actor sees the line “I love you” in a script he’ll turn the part down. Too head-on, too embarrassing, too soppy. And what writer will write it?

Love’s there – there’s a good market for romantic comedy – but must be undermined for the single-household audience. More and more of us tough-minded cookies live alone. Bridget Jones’s Diary did well – a nice quirky female film – but hardly a weepie. The big knickers brought us back to reality just when the heart began to race, the breath to catch, the tear welled to the eye. Joan Crawford never wore big knickers: can you imagine Bette Davies getting fat, purposefully, for a romantic lead? We are left with the closing kiss between the uglies in Shrek, and are grateful for that.

For how we miss it, we job-crazed, gym-hungry girls. It’s hardwired in. How we remember the odd line, the odd romantic scene that slips through. Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans saying to Madeleine Stowe: “Just stay alive and I’ll find you.” The heart lurches. But then he started running. And running and running. Or that scene in the tent in Brokeback Mountain when Ennis and Jack realise they love each other? But what use is that in the heterosexual world?

Best stay in the past. When people left the cinema after Brief Encounter they were crying. When everyone was buttoned up, how thrilling the prospect of unbuttoning! In 1956 Deborah Kerr danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I – she so dainty with her full, full skirt and he clomping around her with his red, red sash and his bare brown torso. “Shall we dance? On a bright cloud of music shall we fly?” Consummation was impossible: that was the point.

Or way back to 1946, Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I'm Going, when Wendy Hiller’s ambitions, thought well lost for love, were sucked down into the whirlpool of desire. Accompanied by that simple, haunting song: “I know where I’m going, and I know who’s going with me.”

That was romance. Will we ever get such films again? I think not: we are all postFreudians now: we have lost our innocence. We are too knowing. Men have feet of clay: the capacity to adore is suspect. Weddings are out, sensible partnerships in. The future’s grim.

Of course there will always be blips of charm and happiness, little spurts of filmic genius. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset devote themselves entirely to love, albeit in a talkative, Hollywood way. And it’s always unwise to predict the future. Surprising things happen. The Titanic sank. Jack died, but Rose lived. And didn’t Kate Winslet look a fine figure of romance on the prow of that doomed ship?

Fay Weldon is writing the screenplay for the film version of Upstairs, Downstairs

Tell us your favourite romantic films, and win our critics' top 20

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