Letters to Juliet
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 I remember most about Letters To Juliet is being at the movie theater for a different movie (I don’t remember what!) and seeing the trailer, which used Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” That was all the editors had to do to reel me in and make me declare I would go to see it. However, and I’m not sure why, I ended up not getting a chance to see it and only watched it for the first time last year. I instantly loved it and it felt like one of the last of its genre.
The film came out in 2010, and it was around this decade that Hollywood stopped giving us that sector of romcoms that did deal with a romance but was more focused on the evolution of its female lead–like Legally Blonde or The Princess Diaries. I’m covering Letters To Juliet because I love it, and I’m pleading for Hollywood to bring these kinds of movies back. I don’t care that some people don’t take them seriously. I don’t care that some people might find them cheesy. I want a light-hearted movie where a character I resonate with gets to explore a European city and find love, but most importantly, find herself!
“I am Madly, Deeply, Truly, Passionately in Love with You”
From the film's title to its Verona setting, it's blatant that love is the main theme of Letters To Juliet. Sophie believes in love, and she's not ashamed to. We know this about Sophie immediately as her current assignment at work is to track down the man from the iconic photo of the sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day. Sophie needs to fact-check the truth about the photo for a story, but she's hoping the truth is that it really was a spontaneous kiss that came from a place of love and excitement. She'd be disappointed if she found out it was actually staged.
But the coolest part of Letters To Juliet is that it's actually based on a real writing program in Verona. Based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet story, Verona has a Juliet Club, similar to a love advice column, where people can volunteer to write letters responding to people seeking love advice. That is something I need to do in my lifetime. Unsurprisingly, Sophie is drawn to the program. One of my favorite aspects of the program is that Sopihe quickly bonds with the other women who work there. They even reunite later when she returns to Verona for the wedding. The women in the program clearly have so much love for each other, and as much as I enjoy the romantic love aspect of the film, there is no love in this world like the love between a group of women.
Sophie is intrigued when she finds a letter from 1957 that has never been answered. Claire wrote to Juliet when she was 15 about her love, Lorenzo, who she was going to disobey her family to be with, but instead, she let fear take over and left him hanging. This begins Sophie's journey to reunite Claire and Lorenzo, with help from her grandson Charlie, who Sophie falls in love with by the end of the film. Sophie shares a special bond with Claire as she gets to know her, and like the women in the Juliet writing program, the love between Sophie and Claire is a crucial part of the film. There's added complexity when we learn that Sophie's mother abandoned her as a child. In a way, Claire is the maternal figure that Sophie never had. However, the loss of her mother also bonds her to Charlie, who lost both of his parents in a car accident.
“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”-Sophie’s letter, Letters to Juliet.
The situations are both tragic and incomparable, but I really love the part when Claire points out to Charlie that Sophie's mother chose to leave, while even though his parents died, he always knew they loved him. While Sophie uses the adventure of reuniting Claire and Lorenzo, which she succeeds in, as a writing project, she's in it for more than just the possibility she'll publish a story. She's in it because she believes in love, and she wants Claire to have a happy ending. She believes Claire and Lorenzo's story should be heard by the world to inspire others and show them what is possible when you don't give up on love.
There were many moments in the film when they kept hitting dead ends. They found several people named Lorenzo Bartolini who were not the Lorenzo Bartolini they were looking for. Even when Charlie thought it was time to quit, Sophie kept going. At the end of the film, we finally learn what Sophie wrote in her letter to Claire. Before she even knew her, she gave her hope that she would never give up on Lorenzo, and because of this, the two were able to find each other again.
“You Need Only The Courage To Follow Your Heart”
I really love the way Letters To Juliet intertwines the stories of following your heart to find your true love with following your heart in terms of career dreams. Yes, Sophie teaches Claire to follow her heart to reunite with Lorenzo, and Sophie follows her heart and leaves Victor for Charlie, but she also follows her heart in terms of being a writer. Sophie expresses her desire to be a writer to her boss at the beginning of the film, but he brushes her off and reminds her that she’s a really good fact-checker.
The Juliet program attracts Sophie because she believes in love, but it also gives her the opportunity to do the thing that she is most passionate about; writing. Meeting Claire also gives her the opportunity to tell a story, even if that isn’t the sole reason she wants to help Claire. Because she doesn’t quit and she listens to the encouragement from Charlie and Claire, she follows through with her story, and her boss falls in love with it. Had she listened to him from the beginning, when he encouraged her to remain a fact-checker, she would have never written the story. In the end, it was so much more satisfying for Sophie to prove her boss wrong than if she had taken his advice.
“I doubt he even notices that I’m gone”
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about society in terms of love and relationships, it’s that most people would rather settle in an unhappy relationship than be alone. This is deeply disheartening, and I really wish there were more people willing to speak up and let others know that it is always better to be happy on your own than miserable in a relationship. I admire Sophie in Letters To Juliet because even though she and Victor were engaged and soon to be married, she realized she wasn’t happy, and she was brave enough to walk away. Most people wouldn’t. Most people wouldn’t end their relationship when they were that close to marriage, whether out of fear of being alone, fear of never finding someone else, fear of what others would say, or fear of starting all over again; most people will stay in an unhappy relationship no matter how obviously doomed it is.
Sophie’s character is a great role model for young women because she isn’t willing to stay. When she and Victor go to Verona on a “pre-honeymoon,” something they planned, knowing Victor would be busy with his new restaurant after their wedding and wouldn’t have time for a proper honeymoon, they spent the entire trip apart. Victor spends the whole trip doing research for his restaurant, leaving Sophie to her own devices, which actually works in her favor. Sophie tries to tell Victor about the Juliet writing program, but he’s uninterested and brushes her off to instead talk about himself and his pursuits. There is nothing wrong with an ambitious partner. I find that actually very inspiring, but there needs to be a line drawn so that work doesn’t become your entire life and you end up neglecting your own finacé.
Victor doesn’t even realize that his neglect of Sophie pushes her right into the arms of someone who does prioritize her. While Sophie and Charlie initially don’t get along, they start to bond throughout their journey to find Lorenzo, and if there’s one thing that becomes incredibly evident, it’s that Charlie cares about what Sophie has to say. He cares about her writing, and he cares about her passions. He listens attentively, and even though she’s engaged to Victor, Sophie and Charlie form a stronger bond in a shorter time period than the bond she has with the man she’s been engaged to for a year. I’ve always been wary of the idea of marrying someone so quickly after starting a relationship. However, there have been many cases of people getting engaged after only months of dating and still having a happy, lasting marriage years later. Letters To Juliet is a perfect example of how sometimes you can know someone for years and still never really know them, but meet someone briefly and feel like you’ve known them your whole life.
“Since the Atlantic Ocean is a bit wide to cross every day, swimming, boating, or flying, I suggest we flip for it. And if those terms are unacceptable, leaving London will be a pleasure as long as you’re waiting for me on the other side,”-Charlie, Letters to Juliet.
When Sophie leaves Verona, Charlie makes her promise him that she’ll finish the story she wrote about her adventure of reuniting Claire and Lorenzo. When she finishes it and her boss confirms he’s going to publish it, Victor is momentarily excited, insisting that he has to get back to his restaurant. He also admits he didn’t read the story even though Sophie left it out for him to read the night before. The relationship reminds me a lot of “tolerate it” off Taylor Swift’s 2020 album evermore. In the song, she sings, “I know my love should be celebrated, but you tolerate it.” Victor isn’t capable of celebrating Sophie because he’s caught up in his own life, and no matter how much she tries to get him to celebrate her, he doesn’t care to do so. The dynamic also reminds me of the six-year relationship Taylor wrote about in songs like “So Long London” and “Fresh Out The Slammer,” where she slowly felt the person she loved slip away and stop putting in effort.
Luckily, Sophie confronts Victor and calls off the engagement. Victor seems caught off guard–he is so far removed from his relationship he doesn’t even realize Sophie isn’t happy. (In “You’re Losing Me,” Taylor’s partner seems equally surprised when she sings, “You say you don’t understand, and I say I know you don’t.”) At the end of Letters To Juliet, Sophie flies back to Verona for Claire and Lorenzo’s wedding, where she reunites with Charlie, and he confesses that even if he has to leave London, a city he loves, to live in her city, New York, a city he thinks is overrated, he’ll do it because being with Sophie is so important to him. It’s like how Taylor went from hiding away in London with her partner to a man who flies around the world to be with her. I imagine that with Charlie, Sophie feels the way Taylor does in “So High School” when she sings, “No one’s ever had me, not like you.”