Letter from an Unknown Woman review – gripping and tragic story, fashioned to perfection

The rerelease of Max Ophüls’s 1948 classic Letter from an Unknown Woman provides a luxurious swathe of emotion. Based on a 1922 novella by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig – whose own ­literary revival is now in full swing – it stars Louis Jourdan as Stefan, a dashing young pianist and boulevardier in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The city is recreated here with gorgeous intensity, very different from the grim Vienna Carol Reed imagined in The Third Man one year later, but quite as vivid. Joan Fontaine is Lisa, the beautiful young innocent who falls passionately in love with Stefan. Are his feelings for her as deep and permanent as hers for him? Fate, with terrible ironies and duplications, takes its course: this gripping and tragic story spans a decade in which Stefan and Lisa leave their youth and their illusions behind them. The action of the film, on the cusp of melodrama, is fashioned to perfection.