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The diversity of streaming platforms can be likened to a multitude of libraries: countless treasures line the shelves, but they often get overlooked. One of the Criterion Channel’s strengths is its impressive list of classic and contemporary gems, which gives new additions instant notoriety. So it was that, in a roundup of new releases coming to the channel, I learned of a film I’d missed when it first came out, and which Criterion’s programmers rightly consider an underrated gem: Love Letters, written and directed by Amy Holden Jones and starring Jamie Lee Curtis, which debuted at the festival in 1983 and was released early the following year. Love Letters has been available elsewhere, but its screening on the Criterion Channel, which begins June 1, is a fitting tribute to a film that should be considered a small but emotionally charged classic.
Born in 1953, Amy Holden Jones made her first steps in the industry quickly, directing an award-winning student film that inspired Martin Scorsese to hire her as an assistant on Taxi Driver (released in 1976). She soon built a successful career as an editor; Steven Spielberg hired her to edit E.T., but she dropped out when Roger Corman, the famed producer of low-budget genre films, offered her the chance to direct. The result was a horror film called The Slumber Party Massacre, which was successful enough to open doors for her in the industry. Although Corman wasn’t known as an art film producer, he had distributed several (including works by Truffaut and Fellini), and Jones convinced him that her next project, Love Letters, would be in the same vein. He liked her script and, as she noted, had only one requirement: that the film should have some nudity (female nudity, that is).
Love Letters is a romantic melodrama based on the classic triangle, which Jones infuses with a modest but shocking modernism, both in the narrative and in the visuals and tones with which she works. Set in Los Angeles, the film follows Anna Winter (Curtis), a precocious and popular 22-year-old DJ on a public radio station. As the film opens, her mother, Maggie (Bonnie Bartlett), is hospitalized. After her mother’s death, Anna goes through her mother’s things and discovers a small box of love letters written by a man named Joseph in the mid-1960s, when Anna was a child. Although Anna’s parents were unhappily married—her father (Matt Clark) is an alcoholic whose presence she cannot stand—she was unaware of the affair. She secretly takes the letters home to a canal in the Venice area and immerses herself in the story they reveal, with the same passion that Joseph expresses and that her mother clearly shares. She reads the letters obsessively, sometimes out loud to her friend Wendy (Amy Madigan), but more often to herself, with the lyrics spoken in Joseph’s voice in the background.
At work, Anna meets Oliver Andrews (James Keach), a successful forty-year-old photographer, who flirts with her. When they meet again, she agrees to have a drink with him. He is open about both his interest in her and the fact that he is married with children; she decisively begins an affair with him. As their relationship develops, Anna, through reading letters, begins to identify with Joseph, the other man, as she is the other woman. Reflecting on his suffering at not being able to be with the one he loves, and knowing the unhappiness of her parents, Anna is determined not to let Oliver make the same mistake she believes her mother made: first by making Oliver love her, and then by convincing him to leave his wife, Edith (Shelby Leverington). As a result, Anna makes all the mistakes described in the book, including giving up her desired job at a major San Francisco train station to stay close to Oliver, and as her feelings deepen, her jealousy of his family life (and his reluctance to leave it) increases, leading to dramatic consequences.
The instant, passionate determination with which Anna devours Joseph’s letters and begins her relationship with Oliver is the essence of both the story and its form. From the familiar elements of melodrama (the eternal triangle plus the family secret), Jones creates a subtly disorienting paradox. The film’s psychological core, its system of motivations, is delicately strung between two extremes: clarity and opacity, near-obviousness and absolute impenetrability. Joseph’s letters seem to simultaneously trigger Anna’s impulsive involvement with Oliver and reveal her emotional range and the practical consequences of the affair. When Anna first meets Oliver, she rejects his brazen flirtations in no uncertain terms. But their second
Sourse: newyorker.com
