Letters to Juliet

Letters to Juliet (2010) is about the women who answer the letters written to Juliet in Verona. Sophie is a fact checker at a magazine in New York and wants to write. She goes to Italy with her fiancé, who is opening a restaurant and spends all his time with suppliers. She wanders on her own. In Verona there is a courtyard known as Juliet's house where people leave letters on the wall. Sophie discovers a group of women who collect them and write back. She finds a letter wedged behind the wall, written fifty years earlier, and answers it. Claire, who wrote it, receives the reply and comes from England. Fifty years ago she left someone called Lorenzo and now she wants to find him. Her grandson Charlie thinks this is foolish. The three of them start looking for Lorenzo across Tuscany, and every Lorenzo they find is the wrong one. The tradition of writing to Juliet is real. There are volunteers in Verona who answer those letters and have done for years; the film came out of that actual practice. Vanessa Redgrave plays Claire. She and Franco Nero, who plays Lorenzo, had been together for many years in real life and married shortly after the film was made; they had met on a film in 1967. Amanda Seyfried leads. The Tuscan landscape is the film's selling point. It runs 105 minutes. Good for: romantic comedy, travel films, and undemanding viewing. Less good for: the story is entirely predictable and the young couple is thinly written.