Letters To Juliet

It may be one of those truths which really are the case. Perhaps the story of Romeo and Juliet is known around the world. Everywhere that such a story of love can be told and remembered.

 it is also true that great art translates readily into other forms.

Or that the work of a genius like Shakespeare continues to inspire artists of other cultures and times.

Only recently I have discovered a particularly beautiful film which offers an insight into just this idea.

It is a film, made in about 2010, and starring Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave.

At one level, it is a simple story of modern day love, and the tribulations that Amanda experiences when she travels to the town in Italy where Juliet lived, as far as the Shakespeare play is concerned.

Whilst in Verona, her fiance, a chef about to open a new restaurant in New York, becomes obsessive about visiting his potential suppliers.

In the words of his fiancee, he has suddenly become very Italian now that he is in Italy.

And so he disappears off to a wine auction, leaving his fiancee where she has become interested in what she has discovered about the house of Juliet.

Every day, this is visited as a site of pilgrimage, by lovers from across the world, who leave letters to Juliet, pinned to the wall of the house where legend has it that she lived.

The work that she has been doing in New York is as a fact checker for the New Yorker magazine, but she aspires to be a writer.

She has visited the house of Juliet, and watched as lovers of all kinds, some clearly distressed, pin their letters to the wall of the house.

And then, she observes that an Italian woman comes to collect the letters in a small basket every evening, and she follows this woman and discovers that the letters have not simply been removed and destroyed, but rather have been removed so that they can in fact be answered.

She is introduced to the four women who are the secretaries of Juliet, employed by the local authority to answer these letters.

They are fascinating women, dividing letters so that they can be answered by the appropriate person. One of them has been married to the same man for 60 years, one answers any letters that have a medical or some sense of loss connected with them, and is a nurse, and one has the job of deciphering the almost illegible ones, are the ones that are in a sense the most desperate.

A little later on that evening, Amanda’s character is sitting up serving the letters, and assisting one of the secretaries to collect the most recent batch of letters to Juliet.

As she is helping to put the letters into a basket, as is the custom at the end of each day, she happens to remove a loosened break in the wall of the house, and thus revealing a letter that has been hidden for 50 years.

Amanda dutifully brings the letter to the secretaries of Juliet, and reads the letter to them.

It tells of a young girl, that wishes to explain to the man that she loves, a local boy close to where she had been attending an art class in Tuscany 50 years previously.

Though she loved Lorenzo Bartoli deeply, she in effect has run away, after they had agreed to do the same together, because they loved each other.

Amanda asks if she can write the letter herself, to the address on the envelope in London, and she telephones her fiance, who is quite happy to stay and spend more time with his suppliers.

Amanda writes her letter, and posts it off that evening.

She spends the next couple of days with the secretaries of Juliet, and imagine her surprise when her letter has been received, the first notice of its having been received being the arrival of Clare’s grandson, who has sought out the secretaries of Juliet, in effect to chide them as to the raised expectations that the letter has excited in his grandmother, with whom he has travelled in response to the letter.

We are not made privy to the contents of the letter at this stage, although we do hear what it contains much later in the film.

And so begins the search by Claire for her long lost love, and Amanda meets Claire after she follows the grandson back to where they are staying.

Claire agrees that Amanda should accompany them, in spite of the protestations at first of the grandson.

Amanda’s background in checking facts, comes into its own when it is realised that they have a huge task ahead of them, in spite of the certainty in Claire’s mind that Lorenzo would not have moved away from the soil that he so loves.

Suffice to say, it is a most romantic quest to find Lorenzo, and I will give nothing further away of the story.

It is a wonderful reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, in a way that is modern without losing any sense of the romance of the original story.

It is rare that I have been so moved by a film, and impressed by its simplicity.

And of course there is an extraordinary coincidence that makes me write this blog story.

A friend that has taken to regularly visiting me weekly on a Tuesday evening will not be visiting this Tuesday, tonight as I write this story.

Because he is on holiday with his family in Italy.

He did not know to where in Italy he would be travelling, only that he might be travelling to Lake Garda.

What is extraordinary is that in the film Amanda and her fiance are to visit Lake Garda, and I therefore realise that my friend is visiting Tuscany, and I am wondering whether when he arrives back he may have visited the city where Juliet’s house is to be found.

It would be quite extraordinary to discover that he has visited this same location that has provided me with such stimulus whilst he has been away for a short break.

Only time will tell.