Love Letters (1983)
35KLove Letters: Directed by Amy Holden Jones. With Jamie Lee Curtis, Bonnie Bartlett, Matt Clark, James Keach. Anna is a young woman who discovers her mother had an affair with a married man for 15 years, so she starts her own affair with a married man. She works for a Los Angeles public radio station. She often must care for her alcoholic father and comply with his many demands. When she finds love letters, revealing her mother’s longtime involvement with someone else, she develops a romantic notion of the idea as something suitable for herself. She meets a photographer, Oliver, who is happily married and a father. Their physical attraction is immediate and they begin a torrid affair, but he cautions her from the start that he has no intention of leaving his family. She has no objection, enjoying the sex and intimacy for the time being, until feelings develop and she begins to desire a permanent relationship, intruding on his privacy in the process, with unhappy consequences for all. In the end she finally meets the man her mother had an affair with and she decides to take a job offer at a radio station in San Francisco to give herself a fresh start in life.
“After learning (from posthumously discovered love letters) that her late mother had for some time been involved in a romantic extra-marital affair, an impressionable LA disc jockey embarks on a similar liaison, with less than satisfactory results (for both herself and the film). Jamie Lee Curtis portrays a character obviously less intelligent than she first appears; married lover James Keach wasnu0026#39;t given a character at all; and the sparks meant to ignite between them fizzle rather than fly. Itu0026#39;s too bad the rare chance to see a love story told from a womanu0026#39;s point of view was wasted on such a conventional romance, in which the protagonist is unable to define herself beyond her (purely physical) relationship with an undeserving man. Even worse: thereu0026#39;s a distinct suggestion at the end of the film that she only chose the wrong guy. A cast of familiar faces all but disappears in superfluous supporting roles.”
