A Heartfelt Lesson on the Rarity and Wonder of True Love

Rating: 9/10 (4 April 2018)

Once in a while you become so immersed in a film that you forget you're watching one, and you simply exist in the same reality as the characters on screen for a small slice of their life which momentarily becomes your own. You see yourself in these characters, but for a moment you even become them, reliving an all-too heart-breaking or euphoric scenario from your past through the characters experience of an entirely different moment, that is in its essence completely the same. These moments come in all of their melancholic glory in a conversation Elio shares with his father in the closing moments of the film. A conversation that soon becomes an honest lesson of life from an experienced academic who wasn't lucky enough to find what Elio so clearly experienced for even just a matter of moments. It's a beautifully touching scene that pleads to the inner romantic in all of us to muster up the courage and take every opportunity life throws at us. Because as we have learned on this journey we all share, even if just for a moment, to love and be loved by someone in return so completely is rarer than one could imagine. To ignore something so wonderful is to ignore what makes life worth living. What a waste indeed.