Deering and Down in a Movie "The Romance of Loneliness"

05/01/09

The Romance of Loneliness is a coming-of-age story about three generations of women confronting their essential solitude. The story takes place over the course of a day, the farmhouse wedding of two young women. Amanda, mid-twenties, a jumble of paradoxes, recovering from a broken heart, has thrown herself into yet another new relationship. She then finds herself in one situation after another that convinces her she’ll always be alone, and by the end of the movie, she decides to embrace that. Margot, mid-forties, is happily married but bored with that happiness, and nursing old wounds she hopes to heal by revisiting them at the farm. Mina, Amanda’s grandmother who raised her since she was orphaned, is a spitfire who misses her deceased husband and can’t imagine why or how two women would marry one another. For her, the wedding is a place of coming to terms with uncertainty and the ephemeral joys of day-to-day life. A friendship formed between Amanda and Consuelo, the man who owns the farm and cooks all the food for the guests, takes place in a crescendo of exchanges in the kitchen that lead to a musical collaboration. In the end love conquers all, not in pairs, but one by one.