“No one cares about me…This is my life.  Welcome to the weirdness.  I’m just trying to navigate a course towards safety and sanity the best way I know how.”  This quote sets the stage for all the strangeness, hardships, and love that you encounter in the film Like Sunday, Like Rain.  It is a story of an unlikely relationship between Reggie, a lonely twelve year old, music prodigy, and genius, and Eleanor, a damaged twenty-three year old who has a broken relationship with her family and a hurtful love life.  The pair meets in an unlikely circumstance when Eleanor becomes the au pair to Reggie.

Eleanor introduces Reggie to connecting with someone that you can’t connect with through analysis or judgement.  She opens his eyes to the reality that someone cares about him even if he feels rejected by everyone else.  The story looks at two stages of life of the wealthy elite and the working class.  It analyses that two people from different worlds have more in common than what meets the eye.  The rejection and betrayal they feel by their families and others, they find comfort in one another.

The music by Ed Harcourt carries the plot and story as each composition adds a new layer to the thoughts and feelings of these two characters.  The piece “Like Sunday, Like Rain” is used  throughout the film to increase the emotions that the characters are feeling of hurt and sadness.  Eleanor’s first interaction with Reggie is listening to his piece being practiced at school.  She is almost in tears as it ends and is sitting in the dark theatre.  The composition spoke to her in a way that words could never achieve, made her miss something that she didn’t realized she missed.  As she spoke to Reggie, she connected with someone with just a handshake.  Reggie makes the comment “Life is a series of colossal mistakes.”  What I think he meant was that we are constantly learning, evolving, becoming the people that we hope to be.  We, as humans make rash decisions, allow the emotional to get in the way of the analysis, but is analysis better than taking a risk hoping we land our feet?  Life is about finding someone that can understand you.  Can sit with you in a room full of silence and not say a word.  Hold your hand without needing to say ‘I’m sorry,’ and be there whenever you need them to be.

This film is an innocent and beautiful story about two people being there for each other in a time of need, and continuing to be there for each other in the future even if they are not with each other physically.  Being two souls connected by music and living with each other in the haunted melody that is “Like Sunday, Like Rain.”  We could all use a reminder that we have been given a gift and it is our obligation to take care of it.  To take care of each other.  To constantly be reflecting on life and who we are.  And to always let the music speak when we are lost for words.

The video below is the piece “Like Sunday, Like Rain” by Ed Harcourt.  Watch the trailer here.