fabian

Letter from an Unknown Woman

through the nakedly confessional words she writes to stefan, lisa invites us into her emotions. emotions which are very much alive to us as they pour from her letter. we share her daydreams, and see the world with the same sense of romantic abandon she does. but she wasn't truly in love, she was enamored with the concept of love itself, an idealization. this unmasks the toxic core of romanticism, the fairy-tale narrative fed to most girls from birth. lisa wastes her life chasing an illusion. the man she desperately loves is impossible to hold because he exists only in her mind. romanticism, by nature, ignores human flaws and relationship strains - but she's in love with this dream, following it to her eventual downfall. in one scene, lisa, wanting to profess her feelings before moving away, waits hopefully and watches disappointedly from a landing above as stefan, her love interest, comes home with another woman. years later, lisa becomes the woman coming home with stefan. the camera's positioning and movements mirror the earlier scene almost identically, emphasizing his routine behavior and undercutting the evening's supposed romance. instead of watching with lisa, we now watch her from above, she's just another woman to him. despite her quiet devotion and his attention that evening, she remains one of many anonymous women for whom he's opened doors, walked upstairs, held out a hand, led into his apartment and soon forgotten. ophuls took what could have been a simple soap opera and transformed it into a tragedy about time, memory, obsession, mortality and love.