Carta de uma Desconhecida

Based on Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's novella 'Brief Einer Unbekannten', Ophuls uses all his creativity at disposal to enable his technicians to capture the cowardice of men and vulnerability of women. It is not only the leading pair who serves as a good example of cowards and vulnerable people. There are also some secondary characters who provide fitting description to words such as coward and vulnerable. The names of the woman's mother and her husband come to mind to provide a suitable description. In 'Letter from an unknown woman', Max Ophuls celebrates the immense power of a letter to convey feelings of disappointment arising out of a failed love affair. The letter in question is quite a long one. It was drafted by a woman to tell her doomed life to her lover. Ophuls depicts all the troubles which a woman is compelled to take in order to get love. It would not be wrong to state that love is out of fashion in current times. It has been replaced by something which resembles love but has a certain amount of physical force. There were times in the past when intense feelings of love were appreciated. 'Letter from an unknown woman" is one such film which has the ability to transport viewers to a time when love mattered a lot.

This movie is really great in how it conjures up so much tasteful melodrama through its structure and the unique way in that the main characters spend less time on screen together interacting than they do just being painfully tragic.

I really enjoy the structure of the piece, through the title letter which gives a sense of dated urgency if that makes any sense. We read along with the man who also doesn't not really know the whole story, and so we see through her eyes in a fresh sense his being while discovering the story along with him. It is an interesting way of making the movie. Fontaine is wonderfully vulnerable and believable as a woman who tries and tries and tries and matures and regresses through decades of life. My favorite part of course is the lovely "train ride" through different vistas, its cutesy but also a comment on how their romance is so supercilious to him but everything to her, in a fake box car. Depression may occur after viewing this film.

This film grows even more extraordinary when compared with its source, Stefan Zweig's novella of the same name. In the story, Stefan is a writer, not a musician. The film transforms him into a pianist, thereby insuring that his seductive art can work on the audience at the same time as it works on the heroine. This movie gets bigger every time it is viewed. It seems to offer new surprises every time, because of the perfection of its structure and the implicative richness of its mise-en-scene. The echo effects ("Two weeks!") take on fresh meanings, and there is even a good deal of religious symbolism to be found.

An admirable scene sums up the whole movie:Stefan and Liza are aboard a "train" and they "travel".It's actually a fixed train,and some kind of stagehand forwards a chocolate box scenery :Venice ,Switzerland... In the real world ,trains are ominous messengers of death and despair:it's a train which takes Stefan away after their affair,a train which takes the young boy to his death.

Stefan (Jourdan)lives his selfish life without seeing anything.Ophuls(spelled Opuls in the cast and credits) shows him as a handsome nice young man,but if you look with care,you'll notice it's always Liza(Fontaine)who's looking at him with love.Jourdan seems to care but actually he knows so many women that he acts as if he's in a play:Liza's admiration means nothing to him who is a ladykiller-see the scene when Liza comes back from the station- and a celebrated musician adulated by the crowds.Liza is the romantic woman,with a zest of touch of Madame Bovary thrown in -it's not a coincidence if Minnelli chose Jourdan as Madame Bovary's lover in his eponymous movie the very same year-For her,there must be only one love ,and she's prepared to give it all.

Joan Fontaine had perhaps never been so good as here.Her whole life ,as she writes her letter (the movie is a flashback ) could have been written in the past conditional.Main influence is certainly that of John Stahl and his "only yesterday" (1933)in which Margaret Sullavan wrote John Boles such a letter.Even the young boy is present in both movies.The last page of the letter,ink-stained (or tear-stained?)takes the audience to a peak of emotion.The final predates the ending of Ophuls's "Madame de" (1953),and the scene on the "train" ,an imitation of life ,the big circus of "Lola Montes" (1955)

This is probably Louis Jourdan's best part as well.A French actor,he was never that much popular in his native country ,and he found his best parts in the US ,be it artistically (Ophuls ,Hitchcock and Minnelli) or commercially (Octopussy) speaking.

Preposterously plotted but stylishly directed and impeccably acted, this is vintage Golden Age Hollywood melodrama. So much of the story-line is improbable, as the young Joan Fontaine's poor young French teenager develops a lifetime crush on the debonair but rakish concert pianist Louis Jourdain, a fascination that has tragic consequences for both. Like another classic film from around the same time "Portrait Of Jennie" the mistake is made in initially having the female lead attempt to carry herself off as a much younger version of herself, but once she matures into adult-hood, Fontaine is effective as the quietly enigmatic woman forever drawn to Jourdain's debonair charms.

I found it equally hard to believe that Jourdain's character could forget his previous encounters with Fontaine, especially the way that Max Ophuls directs the telling scenes, never mind that she eventually goes on to father his child. Such a plot could only end in death and tragedy and while I couldn't believe a word of it, still it was wonderfully entertaining along the way.

The costumes and sets are excellent and Jourdain and Fontaine are to be commended too for their fine performances, but doyens of film-making will particularly enjoy the skill with which director Ophuls employs his camera-work, so fluidly at times that the action appears to float in front of the viewer's eyes.

In a way, this film reminded me of grand opera, a wholly unbelievable story brought to life by the skill of its creator.