AN UNEXPECTED LOVE begins with a quote from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and then proceeds to harpoon the great white whale of a stale marriage.

When Ana and Marco arrive at the airport to farewell their son Luciano, who is leaving his Argentine homeland to study in Spain, they are filled with certainty that they’ve done well as parents.

However, his departure leaves a significant hole in their everyday lives, and after more than twenty years of marriage, both reluctantly come to admit that their feelings for each other have shifted.

Theirs is a cosy connection, warm and worn as an old cardigan, but their passion has been spent on parenthood and their nest now seems empty of emotional and erotic charge.

So as if it were one last project together, Ana and Marco decide to ‘consciously uncouple’, and begin to explore the surprising and sometimes wonderful world of the newly-single.

A film version of the Pina Colada Song, AN UNEXPECTED LOVE becomes the expected pleasure due largely to the two central performances from Ricardo Darin as Marco and Mercedes Moran as Ana.

These two accomplished actors give heart, soul, and gravitas to this insanely civilised divorce comedy.

Co written by Juan Vera and Daniel Cuparo, and directed by Vera, AN UNEXPECTED LOVE is a modern romantic comedy of the petit bourgeois of Buenos Aries that succeeds on shrewd casting and cohesive writing imbued with a sense of place and feeling for cosmopolitan reality.

Think a Latin Woody Allen with less neurosis and you’re some way there in imagining the flavour of AN UNEXPECTED LOVE, where intellectuals grapple with existential thought, putting emotions in a half nelson and tossing them into the turnbuckle before wrestling them to the mat.