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.