Analysis Of Letter From An Unknown Woman

Decent Essays
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls 1948) is a classic tale of unrequited love. The film centres around a lifelong love that Lisa Berndl (Joan Fontaine) feels for her former neighbour and pianist Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan). To Lisa, this love is her destiny. She shapes her entire life behind it—indeed, she ‘defines her life by his presence in it.’ Despite this, she leaves him three separate times throughout the story. The first time, she leaves Vienna for Linz only once she is sure he is not hers. She comes back to Vienna soon into her adulthood. The second time she leaves him, it is out of a desire to be the ‘one girl who never asked anything of you.’ Their reunion is entirely by chance—they happen to be at the same opera. It is the …show more content…
Overtop diegetic sounds of the people and the non-diegetic sound of the orchestra warming up is Lisa’s narration. She …show more content…
The film cuts to Stefan and then back to Lisa, who has lost the calm happiness she had before: the smile has left and her poise as well—she cannot help but fidget with her coat. Up until this moment, the shots have been full of movement but now it is static, mimicking how her world as she knows it is has stopped. This is taken further in the next shot, when she stands out in white in the opera booth. The camera dollies out to a full shot as they sit down before the camera cuts to a static shot of Stefan, who turns towards the light and appears to see something. The camera then cuts back to Lisa, in the light which presumably Stefan is looking at, and dollies in on her and her husband in a medium close up. Her introspective narration begins as the camera dollies in on her, realizing that, ‘Everything was in danger. Everything I thought was safe—somewhere out there were your eyes and I knew I couldn’t escape them,’ as her helplessness in the face of Stefan Brand re-entering her life dawns on her. She is fidgety and distressed and this rubs off onto her husband—his eyes are solely on her, growing more agitated by the

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