It is easy to live in a perpetual state of longing, where one allows fantasy to take over and construct reality as one sees fit. This is, after all, what makes affairs so easy and yet so painful. While they need not be physically intimate, all ultimately remain ideas of the mind. On the one hand, gone goes the responsibility of everyday ennui, and rather, that space is filled with ideas about Romance and possible futures together. However, should this future never come to fruition, or even should one go further as to realize the person one has fantasized over is nothing more than a dud, well, perhaps this might make letting go easier after all?
Love Letters is a very sensitively rendered film about longing. The second feature from Amy Holden Jones, her first was The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), which is a campy popcorn flick. This time, however, she is dead set (no pun) on something more serious. Granted, keep in mind that this is a 1980s film so it is not without its flashy dream sequences and clothing of the era, but for a low-budget film, Love Letters delivers.
The film stars young Jamie Lee Curtis as 22-year-old Anna, a classical Radio DJ for a show in California. Her mother is dying in the hospital, and upon her visit, the two casually chat before Anna has to leave. ‘I have a show,’ she says, ‘But I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Likewise, Anna’s father also visits, and there is a notable distance between them. Little does Anna know that this is the last time she will see her mother alive. Then, after the funeral, Anna uncovers a box with her mother’s love letters—all seem to have been written by a man named Joe, with whom her mother had an affair while married to Anna’s father.
As she reads the letters, the voiceover delivers a sensitive tone that is both expressive and well written. While most might assume infatuation played a hand, Anna believes this to be her mother’s long lost love, and yet for whatever reason, she denied this man her commitment out of loyalty to Anna’s father. Throughout the film, the letters are read as voiceover, and they’re not necessarily limited to Anna’s mother but they also imbue themselves into Anna’s own psyche as she too embarks on her own affair with a married man.
John Keach plays Oliver, a 40-year-old talented photographer who is married with two kids. Upon first sight of Anna, he tells her how ‘extraordinary’ she is, and from then on, boundaries are crossed and sooner than later they are screwing by the beach. ‘This sounds like a bad soap opera,’ you are thinking. And I might be inclined to agree, save the fact that the film is about Anna and her perspective. So, with that in mind, it’s only natural for the love devotee to share what she feels—idealized perceptions of love. What is notable, however, is that the film doesn’t shy away from what Anna is after. As example, when the photographer comes over one afternoon, he informs Anna that he’s just made love to his wife. Crying and distraught, Anna says, ‘Why can’t you just lie to me?’ This is an important moment, as we see that Anna is more about wanting to live in the fantasy than wanting to accept reality because after all, fantasy doesn’t hurt and reality does.
In his review, Roger Ebert makes some key observations: “This isn’t a soap opera romance; it’s an investigation into how we can intellectualize our way into situations where our passions are likely to take over. Anna and the photographer spend happy times together. They are ‘in love.’ Anna thinks she only wants an affair, but she grows possessive in spite of herself. And when she spies on Keach’s family, she sees that his wife is a good woman and there is love in their home. Her life refuses to parallel the love letters.”
Likewise, we don’t feel very sorry for Anna’s alcoholic father who might have sexually abused his daughter—if he has, we don’t really know, as this is only hinted at. Overall, however, Anna’s father feels inferior to both his widow and his daughter. There is also, of course, the undertones of Anna possibly ‘chasing after her father’ by going after a married man who, despite what Ebert notes in his review, is a bit of creep. (Take, for instance, when Oliver tells Anna to hide in the car, lest one of his colleagues might see her, or when he and one of his colleagues are engaging in an intellectual discussion that borders on pretension, leaving Anna off to the side, like an afterthought, looking bored.)
Eventually, Anna comes to let go—not just of the affair with the married man, but of the ideas about her mother and her life. It’s always interesting when someone dies to find unfamiliar parts of them later, almost like encountering a stranger. Then, when Anna visits her mother’s grave, she encounters a man who has placed gardenias—her mother’s favorite flower—on her stone. She comes to find this is Joe—her mother’s long-lost love and the author of the letters. He is polite, but one must admit that their relationship never seemed to progress beyond courtship. Any therapist would say what they had was nothing more than infatuation, but Anna sees it for the love she believes it to be. This realization inevitably helps her purge the married man from her life, as shown when she burns the same love letter written to her mother that she copied for Oliver.
Love Letters is currently streaming on Criterion, and it’s one of those films that on the surface appears too easy, yet beneath a complexity lingers. It’s always a pleasure to find a new and interesting film, yet unfortunately for every Love Letters, there are a dozen duds to wade through. Jamie Lee Curtis has shown herself to be an actor of depth, e.g., for instance, this performance, and compare it to her character in The Last Showgirl (another film that deals with Romantic fantasy) to see what I mean.
To live in a state of longing is to engage in an endless courtship with possibility. The future can be a nice place to rest your head someday, but the present is always what’s in front, reminding you of what is there. To deny it is to deny reality, albeit no one says that the occasional fantasy hurts anyone, but to stay there long term will ultimately result in delusion. I think Kurt Vonnegut once said something about the future being like an old dog that will always fall at your feet—no need to chase it. He likely said it better, but you get the idea. The present isn’t always kind, but at least it is there.
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More from Jessica Schneider: Words & Worlds Rearranged: Reviewing “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, Sad Dreams: on Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” (2024), Speaking In Celebrity: Irek Dobrowolski’s “Life and Lost Art of Szukalski” (2018)