Friday 17 October 2008
Saturday 4 October 2008
Letter From An Unknown Woman
Part of the reason Brokeback Mountain worked so well was its encapsulation of a perfect - yet limited; doomed - period of time. The first act, the first summer on Brokeback is so exciting, so intoxicating for Jack and Ennis that they are forever doomed to try to recapture it. We as an audience feel it as viscerally as the characters themselves.
Letter From An Unknown Woman, I think, would like to tug on our heart-strings in the same manner. It certainly has the story for it. In Vienna in 1900 a teenager, Lisa, falls in love - from a distance - with her new neighbour, a dashing concert pianist called Stefan Brandt. She swoons to the sounds of his piano coming through the walls, holds doors open for him, watches as he brings home, early in the morning, a succession of beautiful society women. But then her mother decides to marry and moves the family to Linz. But Lisa runs away, back to Vienna, finds a job and every evening stands at the street corner, looking up at Stefan's window. One evening he notices her and a whirlwind romance ensues. There is something about her that fascinates him, something mysterious. But soon he discovers he has to go to Milan for two weeks, and in those two weeks - here the film jumps rather and becomes a bit muddled - Lisa realises she is pregnant. In her voiceover - the titular letter, delivered to Stefan the night before he faces a duel - she says she never told him because she wanted to be the "one woman who never asked you for anything". So their lives part, she raises her son, marries a respectable army fellow, but while he apparently forgets her, she never does he.
A decade later, at the opera, he spots her and something - he doesn't know what - stirs in him. She notices him and runs out; they bump into each other in the foyer. "There's something about you," he says, "I can't put my finger on it." The next day, she goes to his house, taking white roses, intended to remind him of their first evening together, when he bought her a single white rose. But he doesn't remember her, and as he goes to his cupboard for champagne, she runs out. We fade back into the present, Stefan finishes the letter, full of remorse for those years of missed opportunities. He looks up at his mute butler. "You remembered her," he says. The butler nods:
As you can see, it's there on a plate. And as I wrote that, I had a few second thoughts, that maybe it just took time to effect me. But. It should've been the most tragic love story. And in some ways it is. But with these sorts of stories everything needs to be pitch perfect, you need to come to the end with that sense of loss etched on you so much you take it away from the cinema with you; that it sticks to you for days. This film didn't do that. And I'm SUCH a sucker for tragic love stories. I am buying Stefan Zweig's original novella as I write this as I want the feeling the film should've given me! I don't know whether it was the acting, direction, the adaptation. Something in it didn't quite click - it is so, so, so close, but not quite. I suppose that's quite apt.
Letter From An Unknown Woman, I think, would like to tug on our heart-strings in the same manner. It certainly has the story for it. In Vienna in 1900 a teenager, Lisa, falls in love - from a distance - with her new neighbour, a dashing concert pianist called Stefan Brandt. She swoons to the sounds of his piano coming through the walls, holds doors open for him, watches as he brings home, early in the morning, a succession of beautiful society women. But then her mother decides to marry and moves the family to Linz. But Lisa runs away, back to Vienna, finds a job and every evening stands at the street corner, looking up at Stefan's window. One evening he notices her and a whirlwind romance ensues. There is something about her that fascinates him, something mysterious. But soon he discovers he has to go to Milan for two weeks, and in those two weeks - here the film jumps rather and becomes a bit muddled - Lisa realises she is pregnant. In her voiceover - the titular letter, delivered to Stefan the night before he faces a duel - she says she never told him because she wanted to be the "one woman who never asked you for anything". So their lives part, she raises her son, marries a respectable army fellow, but while he apparently forgets her, she never does he.
A decade later, at the opera, he spots her and something - he doesn't know what - stirs in him. She notices him and runs out; they bump into each other in the foyer. "There's something about you," he says, "I can't put my finger on it." The next day, she goes to his house, taking white roses, intended to remind him of their first evening together, when he bought her a single white rose. But he doesn't remember her, and as he goes to his cupboard for champagne, she runs out. We fade back into the present, Stefan finishes the letter, full of remorse for those years of missed opportunities. He looks up at his mute butler. "You remembered her," he says. The butler nods:
As you can see, it's there on a plate. And as I wrote that, I had a few second thoughts, that maybe it just took time to effect me. But. It should've been the most tragic love story. And in some ways it is. But with these sorts of stories everything needs to be pitch perfect, you need to come to the end with that sense of loss etched on you so much you take it away from the cinema with you; that it sticks to you for days. This film didn't do that. And I'm SUCH a sucker for tragic love stories. I am buying Stefan Zweig's original novella as I write this as I want the feeling the film should've given me! I don't know whether it was the acting, direction, the adaptation. Something in it didn't quite click - it is so, so, so close, but not quite. I suppose that's quite apt.
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