Letter from an Unknown Woman
Max Ophüls (1948)
The film was made in Hollywood but it’s set mainly in fin-de-siècle Vienna (‘about 1900’ and the preceding years). Stefan Brand, a former concert pianist but a more enduring hedonist, arrives home late one night; at dawn he is to fight a duel with a man called Johann Stauffer. Brand has no intention of keeping his appointment – his opponent is a renowned duellist – and means to flee Vienna before his companions return to collect him next morning but his departure is interrupted. He has received a letter that begins ‘by the time you read this I may be dead’ and he reads on. Letter from an Unknown Woman is the story of a woman’s obsessive and unrequited love for a man who, following the intervals between their encounters, repeatedly fails even to recognise her from their previous meeting. The film’s mise-en-scène is a wonder (the cinematographer was Franz Planer and the art director Alexander Golitzen). The play of light on costumes and jewellery is beautiful and the variety of movement of Ophüls’s camera quite extraordinary: it darts and spins, glimpses through windows and into the confined, dark interiors of horse-drawn carriages, up and down and round staircases.
Michael Kerbel’s piece in Film Comment (1971), which the BFI used as the programme note, treats the picture exclusively as a work by Max Ophüls – not as the romantic melodrama that it also is. Kerbel’s commentary has only a little to say about the two principal characters – he describes how they feature in particular visual compositions and quotes one or two of their lines – and nothing to say about the actors playing them. This is understandable because Ophüls is such a distinctive stylist yet it still seems a limited approach to a type of film in which engaging the audience’s emotions is an integral part of the experience. The success of the picture depends ultimately not on the look and sound and movement of the piece, important though these are, nor on the believability of the series of events described. It depends on whether you believe the emotional truth of the state of mind and predicament of the heroine Lisa Berndl. In order to do so, you need to be compelled by the woman’s obsession; in order to be compelled, you need to be persuaded by the actress playing the woman.
Joan Fontaine gives a good performance as Lisa, especially – and remarkably, given that she was thirty when the film was made – as the teenage girl who falls completely in love with Stefan Brand as soon as she sees him, some time after he and his musical instruments have moved into the block of apartments where Lisa lives with her widowed mother. (Lisa hears Stefan playing well before she sets eyes on him.) Fontaine’s naturalness – the combination of physical spontaneity and emotional transparency – makes you believe in Lisa’s love at first sight. (And the fact that she barely describes or tries to analyse her feelings helps to convey the unconditionality of Lisa’s love.) Fontaine has some strong and affecting moments as Lisa grows older and the relationship with Stefan darker yet her acting pays diminishing dividends. She tends to rely on a single mannerism – she moves her head forward, seeming to suppress a cry – to express suffering, and she’s not able to make you feel that suffering. When she reads from the letter she’s written to Stefan, her voice has a regretfulness which, although hypnotically unvarying, is inexpressive. She’s nonetheless charming, and funny, in the course of the film’s central passage, the one enchanted evening that she and Stefan share. (It ends with their making love and Lisa’s becoming pregnant: some time after the child is born, Johann Stauffer, fully aware of what has happened, proposes marriage to single-mother Lisa and she accepts.) At one point during the evening, the couple sit together in an amusement park train – you choose the country you want to travel to and the operator turns a handle to make a painted backdrop of it appear from the train window. Fontaine’s chatter, as Lisa tells Stefan that her father worked for an international travel company but never visited any of the places about which he was knowledgeable, has a lovely rhythm.
The pair go round the world in this train, then, when they’ve run out of countries, begin their travels over again. This is a great sequence. It’s delightful because Lisa is happy and Stefan is brilliantly seductive and there’s real connection between Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. It’s comical, thanks to the cameos of the woman at the box office and the train operator. It’s chilling because the really-going-nowhere repetition of their travels crucially illustrates Ophüls’s view of the relationship between Lisa and Stefan. The sequence also resonates with others involving real trains: when Stefan, the day after their night of love, sets off for Milan with the orchestra he plays for (and vanishes into thin air); when Lisa puts Stefan Jr on the train that will take him back to boarding school and they sit, for a few fatal seconds, in a carriage that shouldn’t have been accessible – quarantined because of a typhus outbreak. The music by Daniele Amfitheatrof – a beguiling waltz whose repetitive lilt becomes more and more sinister and claustrophobic – perfectly supports Ophüls’s main theme. That theme is rather contradicted by the eventual resolutions of the story: Lisa is disillusioned, realising that Stefan will never love for her; he rises from reading her letter a contrite man and rides off to his duel – and, we assume, his death at the hands of Lisa’s husband (a death that Stefan now believes he deserves). This may reflect the tension, about which Nick James wrote in his good recent piece in Sight and Sound, between the intentions of Ophüls and those of Stefan Zweig, from whose novella Howard Koch adapted the screenplay. Yet it’s the director’s vision that we experience primarily and Ophüls’s superb control ensures that he has the upper hand. (It also serves to reinforce the sense of the characters being less than free agents – which makes sense of Michael Kerbel’s response.)
The underrated Louis Jourdan is increasingly impressive as Stefan – and disturbing because his charm is as undeniable as his heartlessness. He has an easy, humorous intimacy with Fontaine on their big night out. Jourdan’s not very believable playing the piano and his vocal emphases are sometimes odd (this was one of his first early English-speaking roles) but he ages convincingly, both physically and spiritually. Ophüls directs him very cleverly – Jourdan oftens seems to be looking away or down, keeping his face in the shadows, in a way that dramatises both Stefan’s elusiveness and the potential for guilt which is eventually realised. There are some good performances in the supporting cast – notably from Art Smith, very effective as Stefan’s mute, all-seeing valet, and Mady Christians as Lisa’s widowed mother, who’s socially proper but palpably pleased to get herself a new and affluent husband. The starchy, honourable Johann Stauffer, is played by Marcel Journet. Leo B Pessin is the odd, unhappy little boy who is Lisa and Stefan’s love child.
16 February 2010