“How many Sophies do you think there are on this planet?”

    Letters to Juliet has all the ingredients for a classic romantic movie. Where do we start?

1. It is set mostly in Tuscany. Indeed, the plot line demands that the main characters drive around Tuscany looking for a 50 year lost love named Lorenzo Bartolini.

2. The plot line involves the intertwining of a fifty year old love affair in search of resolution and a brand new budding love affair in search of the light of day.

3. The principle love interest is pretty and the two men she must decide between are both handsome foreigners (an Italian chef who loves the tastes of wines and cheeses and breads and pastries on the one hand and a well-off British lawyer who defends defenseless immigrants and poor people on the other). Both look good in bathing suits by the way and can speak some Italian.
   
   
4. Everything in the plot revolves around the world’s greatest romance, Romeo and Juliet so its completely situated in a context of romance already.
   
   
5. The fundamental principles of the Romantic Era are never violated. All protagonists must wrestle with the question of the supremacy of the emotional attachment reflex but they come around to the right conclusion eventually. The key to a romantic movie is that it must play out LIKE Romeo and Juliette but there must be another scene AFTER the two kill themselves in the Capulet mortuary where they get up and say “just kidding. We aren’t dead.”

I can find no flaw with this movie as a formula. It is simply perfect. Indeed. I even forgave the principle characters for kissing one another in spite of “Julliets” previous engagement (ringless though it was).

In a nut shell, an American writer finds a fifty year old letter in the stones of Juliet’s house in Verona. It is a letter of regret written by a woman named Claire who chickened out of a relationship with a man named Lorenzo she deeply cared about because of some family pressure. On an impulse, the American writer, writes a letter to Claire and inspires her to go on a mission to discover what happened to her beau. Here is the text of that letter.

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 if what you felt then was true love, then it's never too late. If it was true 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 - love to leave loved ones for, love to cross oceans for but I'd like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I will have the courage to seize it. And, Claire, if you didn't, I hope one day that you will.

All my love, Juliet