Carta de uma Desconhecida

This movie is the adaptation of Stefan Zweig's story "Letter from an unknown woman" to China settling in a time period before the cultural revolution (1930-1948).

The director (Xu Jinglei) who is also the main actress of the movie has created a very nice visual atmosphere to reflect a heartbreaking one-sided love story. The performances of the players and the music of the movie are successful. Although the tempo of the movie becomes unnecessarily slow at certain parts, the overall result is quite satisfactory.

If you are interested in Asian culture and the living style, you will find an additional taste in this movie.

Overall, it's a nice movie for Xu as her second movie as both the director and the leading actress. The adaptation is so natural that nobody would regard the story as a "non-Chinese" one. The music is great with Lin Hai, the outstanding composer. The sound of Pipa goes smoothly with the movie, typical Chinese which fits the time background. As for the actors...Well, here is by what I mean "it could be better". Jiang Wen isn't that suitable for this part as "the man", Xu Jinglei(the director herself) isn't mother-like enough for the part as "the woman". Some supporting roles are quite good, eg. the old servant... Voila.

Long, languid shots of an immense beauty define this beautiful story. Warm, gentle colors fill the screen with stunning images and sounds, both music and painful silence awaken all our senses. This is a movie of a different kind than the average Western viewer sees in the theaters.It doesn't bombard you with explosions and cheap thrills. It doesn't cherish the obvious and trite. It dares to force the viewer to introspect and face the disquiet. This is a different world, where the real action and thrill is in the eye of the beholder, where director is not expected or required to chew everything for us, so that, God forbid, the viewer doesn't choke on the plethora of meaning. And guess what? We survived and we are better for it.Thank you.

I am a huge fan of the American film Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls/Koch, 1948), so I was ready to be sort of defensive about this one. But I must admit it is really very very good. One reason I don't mind having another version is that this one is so different. While the 1948 version is squarely in the romantic tradition, this film is very realistic. It is also much closer to the Stefan Zweig short story that both films are based on. The best thing about it I think is the amazingly convincing portrayal of a character who ages from her early teens to her early thirties. I have never seen that sort of thing done so well. The one flaw, I think, is the casting of Wen Jiang as the man who is the object of the woman's erotic obsession. He just doesn't have the magnetism to get us to sympathize with her fixation on him. But then, maybe we aren't supposed to.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004)

I got this in the mail by mistake, but was thrilled to see a contemporary Chinese adaptation of the famous story by Stefan Zweig. The lush, fluid Max Ophuls version from 1948 would have to wait.

But hopefully not for long. This one, filmed with the common "pretty" cinematography of a lot of contemporary epics and romances, is really adequate on the surface. I say that without sarcasm, because it does gradually and slowly (too slowly) tell the story. It lingers on pretty details, it luxuriates in mood and in the passing of time, and it inserts some historical particulars that make it its own film (namely the Japanese aggression on China as WWII approaches and then unleashes). All of this goes almost nowhere emotionally, or even in a narrative sense, mostly because it is simply presented, rather than organically unfolded.

I think it might be enjoyable for its ambiance, and for a nostalgic look at an earlier China. The story is given what it needs to make sense, but is overwrought in a way the Ophuls film, by some magic, is not, even though it's the same melodrama at hand. Maybe it is partly an issue of good old acting and directing--a lack of truly penetrating acting is plain enough, but the direction avoids some of the great possibilities with even these two main leads, often watching them from afar or without words. This can work beautifully in film, of course, but it takes a different kind of poetry to pull off.

So, the appearances of a moving, great movie only.