Films lie. Sometimes they don’t mean to, sometimes they have every intention to, sometimes we’re outraged about it, sometimes we think they’re foolish for trying. Sometimes, though, we don’t even know we’ve been lied to.
Opening on February 12, Max Ophüls’ canon-botherer Letter From An Unknown Woman, will go on a limited run at BFI Southbank. The purveying images used to promote this film down the ages do it something of an injustice. You would be forgiven for thinking, having seen the ravishing images of a couple embracing, a faraway look in the opal eyes of Lisa (Joan Fontaine), rich, sumptuous costume and gently accented lighting, that the film would simply fall neatly into the long line of romantic melodrama.
Well, it does and it doesn’t. Rarely has a film provoked such volume of cinematic critical debate down the years. At the peak of its critical chow-down, the furrowed brow furore resembled something akin to what the venerable Mr Roger Ebert and co are belatedly indulging in over at the Chicago Sun Times around Michael Haneke’s Hidden.
Why the rumpus? Well, as with all great films which seem to regenerate from within, as the ages pass and new audiences take hold, recontextualising at will, the film is sodden with ambiguity. That is to say an ambiguity which is so cleverly disguised in a neat and easily acceptable shell that once tapped open, it becomes like a never-ending ball of wool guiding us blindly through the dark.
Letter From An Unknown Woman, like Hidden, has a subtle divergence between what we see, what we hear, what we are shown and what we are told. Although unlike Hidden, Letter From An Unknown Woman supplies us with an obvious narratorial guiding voice and framing device – which is the reading of the eponymous letter by Louis Jourdan’s terminally forgetful concert pianist (Stefan). His memory is like the notes he plays on his piano – once struck they are already decaying, ebbing away from our ears. The story that Lisa tells in this letter fills in the gaping vacuum of Stefan’s memory which then becomes the film’s story as is presented to the audience.
If only it were so simple though. To surmise, the letter is a story of unrequited love, of missed opportunities, of unrecognition, of events which are defined by something not happening (ie he doesn’t see her, he doesn’t recognise her, he doesn’t remember). In short, it is essentially a story of nothingness. Confusing, yes?
Well, add into the thick mix that we are back in the pea-souper territory of an Unreliable Narrator (Lisa might well be classed nowadays as something of a stalker) where her voiceover (the letter being read in the mind of the pianist is the woman’s voice) only tells us things that she wants to tell herself, disguising her own insecurities, inadequacies and partiality. Well, maybe that’s the case anyway. It’s hard to be sure. All this, too, when we are all talking about ol’ Holden Caulfield again.
We take for granted that we what are seeing are things as they really happened, because, as we ‘know’, the pianist has almost permanently recurring short- term amnesia. Her voice appears true, heartfelt and authentic. Ophüls’ varying cinematic re-enforcers – lighting, music, movement – are all employed to support her melodramatic version of events, rendering them even more believable to the audience. He’s speaking our cinematic language.
And yet, another layer creeps in from time to time. Ophüls is a canny operator of such slick ability that he can seamlessly move from the Lisa’s point of view to ironic detachment without signalling that he is about to do so to the audience. He sometimes does this through camera work, he sometimes does this by cunningly changing the music on the soundtrack, exposing both his protagonists’ self-deception and ours. You have to be on the ball throughout the film to catch this, however, such is the grace of Ophüls’ gear-changes.
As the years pass, the same subtle ambiguities may well be exposed in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. At times you are aware of the Teacher’s voiceover, repealing what you see, what you hear and feel happen elsewhere, off-screen. He seemed to cast himself as detective, confidante, romancer and moral centre. But then, at times, what we are permitted to see and hear matches exactly what we’re being told. Such is the dexterity and exquisite craft of these directors, we are literally putty in their hands, cast adrift into grey areas where our memory plays tricks. Letter From An Unknown Woman, however, once seen, is difficult to forget.
