Restored, Max Ophuls’ film is a true old-fashioned melo, elegant and melancholic.
“By the time you read this, I will be dead…”. In Vienna in the 1900s, Stefan Brand receives a letter that begins like this. Pianist, former young prodigy, now past glory, compulsive seducer, he is preparing to leave the city at dawn, to escape a duel with a jealous and certainly scorned husband. But his destiny will be disrupted by the reading of this “Letter from a stranger”, title of the film by Max Ophuls, adapted from a short story by Stefan Sweig published in 1922. Restored in 4K and selected at Cannes Classics, this 1948 classic, which will be released on February 9, is the story of an impossible love.
A French actor who became a celebrity in the United States, Louis Jourdan, “pretty boy, good looks”, the very image of the French lover, plays the inconsistent Stefan Brand. Joan Fontaine plays the unknown author of the letter, Lisa, a young girl when the handsome and intriguing Stefan moved into the apartment next door. And with whom she immediately falls in love. Away from Vienna for a while, after her mother’s remarriage, courted by a young lieutenant, Lisa reserves herself for Stefan, who knows nothing about it.
Romanticism in black and white
Back in Vienna, an attractive, independent and solitary young woman, she meets again one evening this man who had hardly noticed her until then. They will share a dinner, a walk in a snowy park, a white rose, a motionless trip in a fairground train with painted decorations, a dance, and a night. The next day, the musician takes a train to go play in Milan, and must return a fortnight later. In fact, a decade passes before they meet again, one evening at the opera. In the meantime, Lisa has given birth to a little boy whom she has obviously named Stefan, and has married another man. And he doesn’t even recognize her, Lisa is barely a memory for him, a woman among many others.
Second film shot by Max Ophuls in the United States (after “The Exile”), this “Letter from a Stranger” is a true old-fashioned melodrama, elegant and melancholy. A Hollywood cinema that has disappeared, romanticism in black and white, a glamorous couple, a setting recreating the Vienna of the time, and a story that takes its time until the end of the night. A voice-over reads us this heartbreaking letter, telling of an absolute passion, of chance and desire, of life’s failures, and at the end Lisa will no longer be a stranger to her distraught recipient.
Patrick TARDIT
“Letter from an unknown woman”, a film by Max Ophuls, with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan (released on February 9).