When his L.A. life and his second marriage fall apart, Frankie Razzini, a guy who likes to roam about, comes back to the Bronx to understand what he had done wrong in the past. In his wallet he carries a picture of his first love, and deep in his soul a bitter remorse, and perhaps a secret. He meets up with his best friend Eddie in the old pub they had once favored and strikes up a conversation with Brenda. Eddie’s shy, Frankie’s charismatic and Brenda’s unattached, so to equalize the situation, she brings her own friend, Carmel , along for the ride. We may have a myriad of typical ideas where this double date may go, but we would be wrong. There’s more to discover. We just need to go back in time, because the past defines the present. And for Frankie Razzini, the past seems to overwhelm his present to the extent it leaves him tearful.

There is a mystery to the story, which drives the movie forward along with the potentially budding romances. We need to know what happened twenty-six years ago, what happened to the girl in the picture and how would it affect what happens now. We keep waiting for someone to finally break the spell of silence, but Frankie, the one person who certainly knows the truth, won’t tell us.

Eddie will.

Once a play and a book, and now a movie by Phillip Cioffari, Love in the Age of Dion, is a pensive romantic journey into the Bronx , masterfully laid out for us by the author. “Like most everything I write, it is a mix of fact and invention,” says Philip Cioffari, the writer and director. “Some parts are close to autobiographical, though perhaps altered. I grew up in the Bronx and use it often in my work. I knew people very much like the people in the film, though I was depicting no one person in particular.”

Philip Cioffari grew up in the Bronx and received his B.A. from St. John’s University and his Ph.D. in English from NYU. He has written a number of one-act plays which were produced Off-Off Broadway. He also published a story collection, A HISTORY OF THINGS LOST OR BROKEN, and a crime novel, CATHOLIC BOYS. His new book, JESUSVILLE, about four people in the New Mexico desert searching for an hallucinogenic plant which is rumored to enable one to see God, is coming out next year. When asked what would he do if he wasn’t writing and directing, he answered, “I “couldn’t imagine his life without those things.”