Letters to Juliet (disclaimer: there may be spoilers!)

I was hesitant to watch this movie.  I just haven't been in the mood for hopeless romantic fantasy-films, and well, this one just seemed to have such an impossible story line that I couldn't even grasp the idea of watching it.  I'm all for fiction, but when it comes to stories about traveling around with a stranger in a foreign country and falling in love with that person in a matter of days, I'm a hard sell.* 

C'mon.  A girl finds a letter from fifty years ago written to Juliet, answers it, and ends up going on a road trip with the aged author of the letter and her grandson to find the aged woman's lost love.  How realistic is that?  Wasn't she afraid that they were crazy lunatics and could've killed her along the way?  Okay, I sound quite cynical.  I can be sometimes.  It comes with the day (and night) job.  

But I was willing to give the movie a chance.  Until she falls in love with the grandson!  And he falls in love with her!  C'mon.  C'mon.  Really?  Is it really that easy?**

Yet to my surprise (who am I kidding? - surprise), I liked the movie.  And yes, as I suspected (expected), it is the kind of movie that enable hopeless romantics to persevere.  The kind of movie that feeds the hearts of hopeless romantics with so much hope and dreams and all that true love stuff.  All the stuff that I wasn't really in the mood for.  But there I was, falling for it ... the movie and its message.  About true love.  I even got teary-eyed as I folded my laundry and watched the aged Claire look for her Lorenzo.***  Ah! 

And it was this part that sealed it for me ... when Claire read the letter that Juliet (Sophie) wrote.  Because even though this story about the search for true love is as far from realistic as Cinderella-and-her-glass-slippers story,**** I believe what "Juliet" wrote in this letter is true.

Dear Claire,

"What" and "If" are two words as non-threatening as words can be.  But put them together, side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life.  "What if?"  "What if?"  "What if?"  I don't know how your story ended but I know that if what you felt then was love - "true love", then it's never too late.  If it was true love then, why wouldn't it be true now?  You need only the courage to follow your heart. 

I don't know what a love like Juliet's feels like; a love to leave loved ones for, a love to cross oceans for.  But I'd like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I'd have the courage to seize it.  And Claire, if you didn't, I hope one day that you will.

All my love,

Juliet

*Okay, I love "The Notebook," but they spent a summer together so they're hardly strangers.  And that was supposed to be real!  Right?

**Yeah.

**Okay, I was crying mid-laundry-folding, but ... how can you not cry?  Fifty years is a long time to wonder and wait!

***Cinderella is the fairytale of all fairytales.  But shh, I still love it!

*photo via weheartit