My Favorite 'Love Story' Movies: #1

The Bridges of Madison County - Starring:  Clint Eastwood & Meryl Streep


IMDB Link: The Bridges of Madison County 

8Track Love Movie Playlist 

My favorite song from the movie:  I See Your Face Before Me by Johnny Hartman

Why I love the movie:  The first time I watched this movie, years ago now, I sobbed until it hurt.  Since then, I've seen it many times and the same holds true.  I cannot watch it without a little piece of me breaking.

This film, by far, gives the truest depiction of most women's lives as a wife and a mother.  We sacrifice more than our family will ever know, we lose parts of ourselves, our own definition, by those sacrifices for others.  We are taken for granted and overlooked.  We are rarely asked if we're happy as a person, if we're fulfilled as a woman.

Our families, most often, do not know that woman - our hopes and dreams, things we gave up and left behind, what hurts us and what makes us giggle.  They don't know that a certain song can make us cry in the bathroom because it brings back a memory.  They don't know that we sing really loud and dance around the kitchen when we're alone because we've been told we're embarrassing when they're home.

Francesca is a beautiful, passionate woman who has forgotten her own needs in the day to day details of  life.  Her husband knows her as his wife and the mother to his children but one realizes while watching that he doesn't know her.

But, Robert does.   He comes down the dusty lane one day and within one drive to the bridge and back, he has fallen in love with everything Francesca is.

Francesca and Robert are not young.  They're in the middle of their lives when they finally find their soul mate and they get only four days to live a lifetime of love.  It's beautiful and heart breaking.

I cannot sit here and write this without feeling tears sting my eyes as I think about the end of the movie.  Francesca's trembling hand gripping the door knob, her knuckles white.  Her eyes huge and puddled with tears.  Meryl Streep doesn't say a word in this scene but she doesn't need to.  Her face and body eloquently speak the depth of love, pain and how fragile she is in the moment.

It is her biggest and final sacrifice for her family.  You don't know whether to love her more for her strength of character and her obvious love for them or to scream and rail when she doesn't open the door and run across the street in the pouring rain to jump into Robert's truck.

I love that this book is about her adult children reading their mother's journals, reading the story of her and Robert's love and finally getting to know her as a woman.  I think it's important for children to know who their mother is or was, once they too are adults and can understand choices and sacrifices she made for them.

This movie is not the typical love story at all.  However, it is the one movie I would most recommend anyone watch - male or female, young or old, married or single.  You'll realize that even if it takes years,until death inevitably finds them, soul mates will find a way to be together eternally.

I couldn't choose just one favorite quote from the movie so I've included a few.  The writing is so real and true to a once in a lifetime love, if we're lucky enough to ever find that one person created to be our match:

Francesca: "I had thoughts about him I hardly knew what to do with, and he read every one. Whatever I wanted, he gave himself up to, and in that moment everything I knew to be true about myself was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before."

Robert: "This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime."

Francesca: "I realized love won't obey our expectations, it's mystery is pure and absolute."

Robert: "When I think of why I make pictures, the reason that I can come up with just seems that I've been making my way here. It seems right now that all I've ever done in my life is making my way here to you."