Letter from an Unknown Woman - 1948 - Max Ophuls

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040536/ Letter from an Unknown Woman is a 1948 film directed by Max Ophüls. It was based on the novella of the same name. The film stars Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians and Marcel Journet. Perhaps the finest American film from the famed European director Max Ophüls, the film stars Joan Fontaine as a young woman who falls in love with a concert pianist. Set in Vienna in 1900, the story is told in a complex flashback structure as the pianist, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), comes upon a letter written to him by Lisa Berndl (Fontaine), a girl who has been in love with him for years. Stefan is in the process of fleeing Vienna on the eve of fighting a duel. As he prepares himself for the nocturnal journey, the letter arrives. It begins, "By the time you read this letter, I may be dead." As Stefan sits back in his study to read this letter, it turns out to be a confession of unrequited love from Lisa. The story flashes backs to when Lisa was 14 years old and Stefan was her neighbor. After following Stefan with a girlish obsession, the romance gets much more serious, and they have a brief encounter. Stefan promises to come back to her after a concert tour, but he never does. Meanwhile, Lisa marries another man when she discovers that she is pregnant with Stefan's child. When she runs into Stefan years later, he doesn't remember her and tries to seduce her. After Stefan reads the letter, he wants to rush to her side, but now poor Lisa is dying from typhus. A lush story of unrequited love in turn-of-the-century Vienna, Max Ophüls's Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) sumptuously visualizes the emotional power of one woman's life-long fixation on a selfish man. The title missive from Joan Fontaine's "unknown" Lisa to Louis Jourdan's flippant Stefan begins a series of flashbacks recounting her all-consuming love for him and his inability to remember her, even after he seduced her once and impregnated her. Ophüls's fluid shooting style communicates the passion that Lisa cannot articulate until it is too late, with lyrical camera movements that linger over Lisa's fascination with anything related to her one night with Stefan and evocative shots of the curved staircase leading to Stefan's apartment. The elegantly detailed period sets and costumes reveal the privileged life that Lisa abandons for Stefan, while subtly suggesting that she knows nothing about him beyond his entrancing surface. Though it was not initially a success, the gracefully romantic Letter From an Unknown Woman has since come to be considered Ophüls's best American film.

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