A Film Canon

This haunting film translates Ophüls' fascination with an incommensurable, Romantic moment into a fusion of noir and domestic melodrama and, more specifically, into Lucia Harper's (Joan Bennett) anticipation of her husband's return from a protracted business trip - indelibly provisional, or even hypothetical, given the extent to which their economic security is predicated on his continued absence. From this perspective, the ostensible point of focus - seventeen-year old Bea Harper's (Geraldine Brooks) manslaughter of her predatory, older lover, and Lucia's subsequent efforts to dispose of the body and deal with ensuing complications - is a mere clarification of this anticipation, as evinced in the romantic rapport between Lucia and blackmailer Martin Donnelly (James Mason), which doesn't stem so much from his increasing sympathy to her plight as from his unwitting elaboration of all the spaces that should be filled by her husband, whether literal (the entire Balboa townscape, itself haunted by all the spaces and facilities designed for summer tourists, but desolate and melancholy in the off-season), or affective (his rapport with her father and son). As with Letter From An Unknown Woman, Ophüls identifies this ceaseless anticipation with his own highly mobile camera, which is nevertheless sufficiently self- effacing to become indistinguishable from the seaward breeze responsible for Bennett's pervasive pose: hunched, clad in coat and sunglasses, and furtively, defensively smoking.