Slice of Italy

Aided by sweeping camerawork, director Gary Winnick does well to
endow Letters to Juliet with a lazy European pace 

Impossible is nothing" is a familiar line these days and couldn’t apply more to Hollywood (may add Bollywood, too) these days. Or what would one say to this attempt to rekindle a 50-year-old dead love affair, which is precisely the premise on which Letters to Juliet is based.

It is an incredible plot and the characters lack credibility because they are more or less caricatures. But the bonus is sunny Italy and the romanticism of Verona, where Shakespeare penned his most famous love story. The screenplay by Jose Rivera is both nostalgic but not without a few digs at the Americans.

But director Gary Winnick does well to endow it with a lazy, halting European pace and in this he is aided a good deal by Marco Pontecorvo’s sweeping camerawork that catches the ambience of the fun-loving Southern Europeans. The music also is supportive with old favourites like "Quando, Quando" but could have also added Sophia Loren’s "Big Bang Bong" of Houseboat fame to warm the cockles of the 50-year-old romance.

Young, sparkling Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and chef-in-the-making Victor (Gale Garcia Bemal) are on a pre-honeymoon visit to Italy to soak in the sun, food and romance. Sophie is a budding writer and is bent on finding a love story to work on. In Verona, she visits Juliet Captulet home, where a host of Juliet secretaries are answering queries of lost lovers and trying to soothe them. Sophie joins them while Victor goes on his gastronomic adventures.

But when handsome American Charlie (Chris Egan) comes to Verona to meet these secretaries, it is because one of them (no prizes for the right guess) has written a very encouraging reply and his grandma Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) has come all the way from the United States to meet her long lost Lorenzo.

Well, the middle of the film is devoted to Claire’s scanning scores of possible Lorenzo’s by fine-combing the surnames. In the meantime, Sophie and Charlie have time on their hands. For starters, they don’t seem to see eye to eye and Charlie upbraids her for using "Oh my God" and "awesome" in the very same sentence. Charlie is cynical, while Sophie is a die-hard romantic. But both have one thing in common. And that has time to show.

By the time Claire meets her knight in shining armour (Franco Nero), the chemistry between the two young ones is succinctly developed and forms the main thread of the story. Amanda Seyfried is vivacious and exuberant and provides the spark for the love story and very handsome Chris Egan (probably a progeny of 1950s hero Richard Egan), reminding one of cult heartthrob James Dean, provides adequate support. But Gael Garcia Bemal is merely academic but for that the story is to blame. It is good to see Vanessa Redgrave in such a major role and though Franco Nero makes a brief appearance at the end, it lends realism as well as nostalgia. They were together in the mid-1960s musical Camelot and even had a child out of wedlock in that flower power decade. Worth a dekko, surely.

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