Letter from an Unknown Woman

Screening as part of BFI's UK-wide season Too Much: Melodrama on Film. See any 3 titles in the season for £24 when you book them together – simply log in and add the tickets to your basket, and the discount will be applied at checkout.

This screening will include an introduction by Dr. Brian Hoyle, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Dundee

Max Ophüls’ stunning black and white film of fate, class and unrequited love is a gorgeous, melancholic nocturnal walk through an imagined turn-of-the-century Vienna, vividly recreated on a Hollywood soundstage. 

Ophüls was Jewish and fled his home country of Germany in 1933, and while he found work in France in intervening years, there is perhaps a current of sadness that runs through his American films; a ghostly sense of recreating a European world which he had had to leave behind. 

A mesmerising Joan Fontaine, 8 years after her breakthrough in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, stars as Lisa, who we first meet as a teenager. She becomes infatuated with her older neighbour, the sophisticated Stefan, an accomplished concert pianist, played with debonair aloofness by Louis Jourdan.

While it is possible to read the film as a surface-level swooning doomed romance, there is also perhaps a darker heart to this film, and Ophüls fills the film with memorable images and visual motifs which belie this. Few directors had the eye for texture that Ophüls had, and certainly fewer still could claim to have mastery over tracking shots and camera movement like he had. It is a shimmering, pearlescent hallucination of memories, hopes and dreams. 

Supported by the BFI Film Audience Network, awarding funding on behalf of the BFI National Lottery.