Letters to Juliet

[msagara]

Letters to Juliet

Tonight, because my youngest is off for three days, Thomas and I went to see a movie. There aren't a lot of movies that I wanted to see--I'm incredibly curious about Inception, but that doesn't start until Friday.

So we went to see a comfort movie instead.


The general idea behind this movie is that women from around the world come to Verona to write letters to Juliet (yes, the fictional Shakespearean one). But these letters are gathered by women who call themselves the Secretaries of Juliet, and they're answered. Our Sophie is a New Yorker who, for a variety of reasons, is on a "pre-honeymoon" but nonetheless is at loose ends. She ends up with these Secretaries, and she finds a letter that was written fifty years ago. She answers it. The woman who wrote the letter then appears, grandson in tow, travelling from London in search of the young man she loved when she was fifteen and in art school in Tuscany.

First, let me admit that this was not full of cinematic awesome. It took no chances, it was absent all grit, it was warm, gentle, and entirely harmless. I thought the actor that played Victor was very good, as was Vanessa Redgrave, but no one else stood out one way or the other; I thought that the movie could have lost twenty minutes with careful editing, and it wouldn't have lost much.

And having said all that, I really, really liked it--because it was exactly what was wanted from a comfort movie. All of the characters were basically decent, all of the motivations for their behaviour were entirely clear, and the ending was capital H happy.

This started me thinking about movies in general, or rather, what I want from a movie. I can read anything. It doesn't matter how intense it is; it doesn't matter how non-linear its narrative structure or how bizarre its characters. I can confront any unpleasantness, I can be moved and almost harrowed.

But I can't do this for movies. What I want from a movie falls into a much narrower range. I loved Lives of Others and I've Loved You For So Long, because at base I found them moving and ultimately beautiful and hopeful, regardless of their subject matter. But I also like movies like Letters to Juliet because absent that startling sense of illumination, they offer me a type of accessible, easy comfort.

I realize this makes me very movie low-brow, but I can live with that.

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[maiac.livejournal.com]

Well, after all, Vanessa Redgrave.