Love goes toward Verona, as ever

It’s logical that romantic comedies blossom during the spring – and Gary Winick’s Letters to Juliet appears as a final salvo from the genre before the summer blockbusters start to kick in. As such, it’s not as insufferable as it could have been, though its high-concept idea gives it a running start.

The setting is Verona – fabled city of lovers since William Shakespeare penned Romeo and Juliet and chose it as a meeting point for Romeo and Juliet. Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a fact-checker for the New Yorker with so-far thrwarted aspirations towards becoming a fully-fledged writer, is visiting the city on a ‘pre-honeymoon’ with her fiance Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who is in the process of opening a new restaurant in New York.

While Sophie becomes increasingly frustrated with his insistence on visiting food and wine suppliers (and attending corresponding auctions and conferences), she takes advantage of his absence to go for some exploring of her own… and discovers a wall where women leave letters to Shakespeare’s Juliet with inquiries about love.

Following up on the phenomenon, she finds that the letters do in fact get answered – by a group of volunteer women with varying experiences of love. Sophie decides to join them, and finds a letter dated 1957 from Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), addressed to an Italian lover – Lorenzo –  who got away. Amazingly, Claire not only replies, but decides to revisit Verona with her disapproving grandson Charlie (Chris Egan). The trio embark on a journey to find Lorenzo and, as Victor picks one business engagement over another, Sophie begins to entertain the possibility that Charlie, although hostile and obstinately unromantic at first, might just be the man for her.

Try as they might, the actors just cannot overpower the sumptuous Italian scenery. This isn’t an obstinately original or particularly sublime story, and neither are the actors required to chew on the surroundings – their emotional journeys are formulaic, and played out in intimate little arcs of cuteness and delight.

Turn to Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona for a work of perfect decorum between character and setting: the love quadrangle of that film matches the smouldering drawl of summertime Barcelona perfectly, and functions to deflate what could otherwise have been a po-faced existential drama into something resembling romantic comedy ground.

Here, however, the rom-com genre mechanics are taken for granted, and the plot rolls as easily on the eyes and ears as does the Italian landscape. It’s all easy to take in and while shallow and manipulative as they come, Winick’s charming hand steers things into highly pleasant territory.

Amanda Seyfried will doubtlessly become boring to all of us if she doesn’t make some rapid career U-turn soon, but it’s hard to imagine any other up-and-coming actress fitting the role better right this instant: instantly ravishing, she is cute but never annoying, and we believe her aspirations and root for her to just dump her scatter-brained fiancee already who, played by Garcia Bernal, is a refreshing turn for the actor. For once, he is the annoying romantic obstacle, not the sun-kissed European Don Juan. And as if to complete the revision, Home and Away’s Egan, as strait-laced Brit as they come, slowly becomes the central object of romantic interest (still, it’s hard to resist the thought that the filmmakers would have given anything to get their hands on a younger Hugh Grant for the role).

Redgrave offers up some dramatic gravitas and is a sweet presence: her chemistry with Seyfried is arguably even more enjoyable to watch than the ‘will they won’t they’ romance that develops between Charlie and our protagonist.

Another amusing side-effect of the slew of rom-com tropes is the unabashed national stereotypes on display. While no malicious intentions are evident, the American gaze pervades throughout: nearly every Lorenzo the trio meet on their odyssey has a knee-jerk romanticism and those who don’t are at least mumbling in endearing ways; Charlie is described as being ‘cold as a fish’ like ‘all Englishmen’… indeed, our heroine seems to be the only rounded character: she uses ‘awesome’ and ‘oh my God’ in the same sentence, but as it turns out, she also has a minor in Latin from Brown University. 

But should you care? Probably not. It’s clear that the film is a fantasy all the way through: the ascent of Sophie’s journalistic career owes more to the trappings of a fairy tale than to the realities of New York publishing… just as sun-dappled Italy, populated by sweet old men and featuring a pack of Veronese women who volunteer as Juliet’s secretaries clearly marks the film out as a perfectly-constructed bit of escapism.