Same Time, Next Year: An Unconventional Ode to Affection

From the moment your ears hear the beautifully bittersweet theme song that opens the film, you’ll be hooked.

Same Time, Next Year (1978) is more than “just another love story”. It’s a compassionate comedy about how love changes and grows over the years fostered around an atypical affair.

This film version of Bernard Slade’s long-running Broadway play follows the relationship between George (Alan Alda) and Doris (Ellen Burstyn), a cheerful accountant and endearingly naïve housewife. While married to other people, they meet at a seaside inn and have a romantic one-night stand. However, their fling turns into an annual ritual lasting 25 years.

Set against the changing decades of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the film chronicles their rendezvous every five years. The characters become a barometer of the socio-cultural changes marked by important events in U.S. history. As the years go by, George and Doris evolve at different paces during various stages in their lives.

As you watch them go through the best and worst of times, you’ll laugh and cry, wishing for a friend and lover as true to you as they were to each other. They develop an intimacy that goes beyond physical closeness, sharing pieces of each other's lives and confiding their innermost desires and worries. You’ll come to care about both of them, rooting for them to get together despite the circumstances, which is a testament to Burstyn’s and Alda’s performances.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, chemistry is an important part of a film—especially this one. With only two main characters and one location, Burstyn and Alda carry the film with a compelling dynamic that makes you feel like you know them. That is partly because they are playing “real” people with noticeable flaws and partly because of their praiseworthy performances.

Alda gives the quick-witted, neurotic George a depth of complexity that might have escaped another actor, while Burstyn plays Doris with graceful warmth that makes you never once think of her as the “other woman.”

By no means do I condone infidelity, but I do believe in soul mates. Which is what this film is truly about. Sometimes the person you marry isn’t always your soul mate. These two people only see each other one weekend a year, yet pick up as if no time has passed—everyone should be so lucky to have one person in their life like this.

Tender and touching in all the right proportions, Same Time, Next Year is a film you can come back to any time, any year and always enjoy—a timeless treasure for all romantics.

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