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Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
🕑 Added 2021-01-15 03:47:26 +0000 UTC
This is a tricky one, partly because Ophüls is negotiating a number of different registers here. I'm tempted to call this a stealth melodrama. That's in part because, unlike the classic "women's pictures" of the studio era, Letter From an Unknown Woman is painfully subdued, its emotional content disseminated in passing looks of disappointment or slight twitches of uncontrolled joy. Joan Fontaine's performance is magnificent, and not just because she is more than capable of conveying the suppressed anguish that Ophüls' film describes. Her Lisa is also a figure whose romantic obsessions display a mental state somewhere between childish, winsome innocence and genuine mania.
In fact, I found myself wondering how Unknown Woman played in 1948, because today it is hard not to perceive Lisa as somewhat mentally ill, fixated on a man she barely knows and determined to destroy her life, over and over again, in her pursuit of him. In 1964, Dreyer would give is Gertrud, which is in some ways a variation on Unknown Woman's portrait of obsessive, destructive love. But even within the overall restraint of his style, Dreyer was able to depict Gertrud as a woman of desire, "risking it all" as they say nowadays, not just for love but for lust as well.
This frankness is missing from Ophüls' film, of course. But what he and Fontaine do give us is a character of unexpected complexity. We see her as a young girl, bashful and barely communicative, but later she is a sophisticated woman of means, having married a benevolent aristocrat (Howard Freeman). This virtual jump-cut of characterization is nevertheless convincing, because we understand that Lisa, like a fledgling pushed out of the nest, was forced by circumstance (and choice, of course) to wise up and navigate the world.
This makes it all the more painful when she re-encounters her beloved, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), and she is reduced to her previous state, her overpowering need for Stefan leaving her emotionally hobbled. The station she's attained and all its trappings just melt away. Thinking about Unknown Woman in relation to La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame De..., I am now interested in Ophüls' take on European sophistication, and how perhaps it inadvertently produces misfits and outcasts who cannot accede to its demands.
By contrast, Stefan is almost a cliche in his blasé attitude toward life, his career, and above all women. To say that Lisa idealizes her love-object is a bit of an understatement. Enchanted by his music and his air of urbanity, Lisa is improbably blinded to what an obvious cad Stefan is. Even during their date, when he professes to truly see her, as someone unlike anyone else he's ever met, we can detect his insincerity, the suggestion that he is speaking lines he long ago scripted in his head.
Part of the confusion that Unknown Woman engenders is the question of free will, which Lisa's husband brings up explicitly. How is it that a woman would actively destroy her life over a man so patently unworthy? This is where the pull of melodrama asserts itself. In her own mind at least, Lisa is compelled to let Stefan drag her down into dissolution and, eventually, death. The final quarter of Unknown Woman, with its introduction of typhus as a diable ex machina, sticks in the craw because it all but abandons the tenuous realism that Ophüs has maintained, against the odds. But it reveals an absolute fatalism that, in its way, is the flipside to the smug European insouciance of Stefan.
Incidentally, this was adapted from a Stefan Zweig novella. Like La Ronde, taken from Schnitzler's play, this film shows Ophüls' strong connection to turn-of-the-century modernism, before Expressionist fatalism devolved into what Kael referred to as "the sick soul of Europe." This was clearly his wheelhouse, and he really made the most of it.
