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I want one!

The picture never looks fussed-over or flattened — it breathes, as opposed to just looking merely pretty. Pontecorvo approaches the actresses with the same uncalculated respect.

The actors here offer plenty sturdy support for their female counterparts: Bernal’s character is scattered but sympathetic; Egan, deeply unlikable at first, by the end opens himself to the camera in a way you’d never see coming. But the picture really belongs to its two leads. Seyfried gives a wonderfully loose, unstudied performance — nothing she does is forced. And it doesn’t hurt that she has the most gorgeous, enormous eyes in movies today: Not even Disney’s Nine Old Men could have dreamed them up.

[. . .]

Nero makes his entrance here, Lancelot-style, on a white horse. It’s a touch so perfect, so silly-wonderful, that it’s something of a salve after the almost-too-painful moment that comes immediately before. Redgrave is now 73, but it takes zero imagination to see the face of the young Guenevere in this older one. She isn’t merely beautiful; she’s a living assurance that the young people we once were can stay alive inside us, no matter how much we grow and change. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Leading ladies lift lovely ‘Letters to Juliet,’” Movieline, 13 May 2010)

From a guy's perspective, it's not so much the eyes as it is the breasts -- of course the film didn't feel flat: not even Disney's Nine Old Men could have dreamed them up! Egan was too nice: caught in a film where the guy's dragging his gal all about the place is cause for “divorce,” but where "his" driving Daisy everywhere she needs is gentlemanly and appropriate, if he didn't evidence some disgruntlement before the end, slobbering CALIBAN would have climbed that tree, not sweet Percival.

Redgrave is living assurance that true love means a vineyard-owning, warm Italian, with gentle manners: As a grown-up still-15-year-old who's moved on from ponies -- or Tony Stark, in regards to "melons" -- would say –“you just want one.”

- - - - -

Further, I'M a bit disgruntled that this film made losing your mom into a mercilessly effective bargaining-chip -- as if the romancing the self-abnegating knight bit wasn't enough to plot out how your man might be wholly owned.

Link: Leading ladies lift lovely “Letters to Juliet” (Movieline)
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