#82: Letter From An Unknown Woman

Letter From An Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948)

I'm falling behind on these writeups. Maybe I'll stop trying to write long ones and just give a blurb unless it's one of my absolute favorites and I want to write a lot about it. (I don't think many people are reading these things anyway.)

Letter From An Unknown Woman has a pretty cliche romantic plot. A man gets a letter from a woman he doesn't know. The letter says that she will probably be dead soon, and she wants him to know that she's been in love with him her entire life. She met him when she was a teenager and he was a famous piano prodigy. She worked as a maid in the building he was living in, and her room was next to his. She fell in love with him listening to him play the piano. At this point she fixates on him. She defines herself according to who she thinks he wants her to be, and refuses to be courted by any other man.

At the beginning I referred to the plot as 'Romantic', but it's really anti-romantic. All the time he spends with her, he's really just skirt chasing. She's so fixated on him that she spends her entire life pining for her image of him. The movie takes a lot of romantic cliches and shows them lead to nowhere except a lot of opportunities -- not missed -- just not pursued.

The beauty of the movie is in the ambiance of the scenes and the cinematography. It's directed so beautifully that you're pulled into and entranced by a story which in and of itself is very cliche. Every scene is memorable, and every image is purposeful.

Letter From An Unknown Woman is not in print in the US. I'd like to thank the country of Korea for printing a lot of NTSC-ALL region coded DVDs for english speaking movies that aren't in print in the US. You can turn off the Korean subtitles, and get them a lot cheaper than their US counterparts. I also got Voyage and Italy on a Korean DVD, as well as about ten Chaplin movies.

Rating: **** 1/2 / 5

64/101

New movies:

Toy Story 3: 9/10

The adventure component of the film is oriented at kids, but the emotional themes are oriented at the people who were kids when the first movie came out. The movie is character-driven and genuinely funny, and hits home with the themes of the dread of being thrown out when you're not needed anymore. It's possibly the best kids' film I've seen since Lion King.

Inception: 7/10

Great visuals, great multi-linear storytelling, good enough acting, average script. An enjoyable movie, but has some plausibility issues at points, and spends too much time explaining the physics of the dream states. The movie would have been paced better and made a little more sense if they just told us minimally what we needed to know to understand the plot and threw us more quickly into the main dream.

Wild Grass: 3/10

There's some beautiful images in the film. But, the plot is paced awkwardly and the characters motivations are not interesting, nor do they make any sense. I haven't seen Resnais' earlier famous work, but I probably should just to repair my opinion of him.

On the plus side, it gives hope to stalkers everywhere. "Never give up! She will someday return your affections!"