Gone to Mums

" What can you say about a twenty five year old girl who died?" With those words, Erich Segal opened his tear-jerker novella Love Story, and a film (and cultural) phenomenon was born. "Gone to Mums" doesn't allow a dry eye in the room. Told from Ray's perspective, it is a most improbable love story, set among the orchards and migrant farmers of rural Australia. He meets Kelly when she beats the crap out of him for trying to steal fruit from her roadside farm stand. Ray and Kelly do fall in love, but their romance is anything but conventional. If Love Story taught us that love was never having to say sorry, "Mums" reminds us that time doesn't heal wounds, it just covers them over with scar tissue.