Sunday, March 15, 2009

Thoughts on Letter From An Unknown Woman

The passionate heroines of Balzac, Flaubert, Stendahl, and Tolstoy are evoked by Joan Fontaine's luminous portrayal of Lisa in Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948), one of the great films of the 40s, and perhaps Max Ophüls' best Hollywood picture. A teenage schoolgirl in Vienna during La Belle Epoch idealises Stefan, a young concert pianist who lives in her apartment block and is barely aware of her existence. As a young woman they meet and spend a day and a night together. A decade passes, she is now married to an older man, an aristocrat, who has accepted her child from the liaison with the pianist. A chance encounter re-ignites her sublimated passion and tragedy ensues. The story's conceit is that the pianist never recalls that day of passion. I can't accept this. He is no shallow cad, but a man of deep melancholy, whose dissipation is an almost inevitable response to his angst and not a fault of character. A sad wrinkle in an otherwise exquisite film.