Love Still 2012

Realising his notions of love were ‘romantic and shallow’, 30-year-old director Guzmán García decided that older people might help wisen him up. A Montevideo dance hall where elderly couples and singles gather to tango proves to be the perfect place for stories. A glance across the dancefloor or a stylish move may have been the impetus for a relationship, and have even led to marriage. Eleven tales, recounted while sitting at a kitchen table or in living rooms, remind us that love comes in myriad forms and can be a mysterious business. Some of García’s engaging, lucid narrators met late in life, with disappointing relationships in their wake; others when in their teens (and lying about their age); a few cannot define what love is; and Mercedes, content in her companionship with Walter, her 81-year-old roommate and friend, acknowledges, without bitterness, that she has never fallen in love, never experienced that ‘beautiful thing that young people have’. Such wisdom rewards us too and is clearly no impediment to sharing a dance. — Sandra Reid