A Film Canon

Letter From An Unknown Woman foregrounds the profound Romanticism that lurks behind Ophüls' wry social commentaries, turning on two characters for whom pleasure consists in its own postponement and subsumption into a incommensurable, revelatory moment that is ultimately identified with death, as evinced in the central act of consummation - a letter written from one (Joan Fontaine) to the other (Louis Jourdan), informing him that she has loved him ever since she shared his Vienna apartment block, as a little girl, and is now on her deathbed. To this end, Ophüls creates an aesthetic of fluidity, encompassing his subtly mobile camera, the man's trickling, ambient piano (sharply contrasted to the abrasive church bells and military bands of Linz, identified with the woman's arranged marriage), and a pervasive, perfumed breeze. This militates against the relatively stagebound quality of the narrative - which is effectively a chamber drama - as does the characters' commitment to imaginatively expanding the world into what it might be, most explicitly in their shared condensation of the pleasures of mountain climbing to the potentially infinite anticipation of ever-higher peaks, but most poetically in their repeated visits to a 'train ride', in which the movement of a painted panorama past a stationary carriage creates a surprising sense of liberation, both from their more immediate concerns, as well as from a model of pleasure that can only ever produce an (admittedly exquisite) sense of loss, frustration and melancholy: "What are you waiting for?" "That's a very disturbing question."