‘By the time you read this letter, I may be dead.’ Now that’s how you start a letter to grab someone’s attention, and even a blasé, middle-aged roué like Stefan Brand finds himself powerless to put it down. We are in Vienna in around 1900, and Stefan, a once-promising piano virtuoso, is preparing to leave the city to avoid fighting a duel with an outraged husband later that morning. Now he sits down in his rented apartment – in the same house, it transpires, where he and the letter’s writer had first met, some twenty years earlier – and continues to read the words that will change the course of his life…
The film gives its stars the opportunity to play three distinct parts within the same role.
As many have said since its first release in 1948, LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN is a magical film; but it is a magic underpinned by a strong sense of narrative balance as well as the elegance and detail of production associated with its director Max Ophuls (credited as ‘Opuls’ here and in his other Hollywood work). Cleanly divided into three sections over two decades, it gives each of its stars – Joan Fontaine as Lisa, the letter’s author, and Louis Jourdan as Stefan – the opportunity to play three distinct parts within the same role. This is more difficult for Fontaine as she starts in her mid-teens, though she is helped by the increasing voluptuousness of her dresses over the years.
Even playing a woman who defies conventions of morality as often as she does common sense, Fontaine is never less than a lady, and Ophuls brings out some unexpected class tensions in the first section of the story. The premature death of Lisa’s father years earlier has reduced the family’s status considerably, to the extent that she is now lumbered with a coarse best friend who is no better than she should be where boys are concerned, and a downright philistine when it comes to Stefan’s music (‘You call that playing?’). When Lisa’s mother marries a wealthy admirer, necessitating a wrenching move away from Vienna and dashing Lisa’s hopes to win Stefan, her kindly new stepfather also proves to be a crass penny-pincher. As if aware of this class disparity, both mother and stepfather point Lisa in the much more respectable direction of the army, and though it fails to stick this time, practically every man Lisa meets from now on will be a soldier – except Stefan, naturally.
We have already seen how the story ends, so know this can’t last.
The long central section of the film covers their next encounter: Lisa, now in her twenties, is back in Vienna as a dressmaker’s model, and still fending off predatory officers. She has been standing outside Stefan’s home every evening for months, and when he finally notices her, Ophuls gives them, and us, an almost perfect romantic night – almost, because we have already seen how the story ends, so know this can’t last. Still, the effect is seductive. We see Lisa and Stefan dancing in an otherwise deserted ballroom, and after the all-female band take their leave, grumbling at having to play for only two people, Stefan begins to play the piano for her. We are given a close up of Fontaine’s face, which registers not just Lisa’s happiness at this long-anticipated moment but also some hint of doubt, as if this whole evening has been too good to be true.
Perhaps to emphasise this ambiguity, Ophuls offers a compelling piece of symmetry shortly after this by filming Lisa and Stefan climbing the stairs to his apartment from the same point, and with the same sinuous camera movement, as a scene in the first section of the film. In that case, however, Lisa, who had returned to the house to declare her love, was observing Stefan climb the stairs with one of his many conquests. Now, as she becomes another of those conquests, she looks briefly and perhaps guiltily towards the place where she once stood and watched.
Lisa can be in no doubt about his sincerity, or rather lack of it.
The cleverness in Jourdan’s portrayal of Stefan at this stage is to suggest an experienced seducer who may also believe that he has found the woman he has been looking for. However, by the time Lisa and Stefan meet again ten years later, she can be in no doubt about his sincerity, or rather lack of it. In the intervening period events have made it necessary for Lisa to marry – a soldier, naturally – so as on the last two occasions, her unwavering love for Stefan will have a disastrous effect on her current circumstances. There is to be one final twist in the letter that will leave Stefan shattered.
As beautifully acted and directed as this film is, it can hardly be described as realistic. That doesn’t mean, of course, that when the film’s hammer-blow strikes, and Stefan finally understands what his actions have caused, the emotional effect is any less devastating. Indeed, the machine-tooled efficiency of the classic Hollywood ‘woman’s picture’ is perhaps comparable with that of a modern superhero movie: each highly-wrought juxtaposition of image and sound, each practised bend in the narrative road, is designed to persuade the audience to overlook the numerous implausibilities of plotting and characterisation and give in to the experience.
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN screened as part of MOVIES ON THE MEADOWS at the 35th Cambridge Film Festival.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOtmlrHJfRU