God this film's score got under my nerves, but its idiosyncratic staginess is actually quite hilarious...for the first few minutes. Then you're forced into imagining how annoying your life would be if you hung all your hopes and ambitions on an adolescent obsession. This is an important lesson for all dreamers of all ages, except it's one that cold, hard disappointment teaches much more effectively than cinema.
Lisa is occasionally an attractive character, but she's the architect of her own misery and (albeit unwittingly) of her own death by Typhus. She's also one-dimensional: the sum total of her adult wishes, beliefs, desires, and thoughts are variations on her teenage crush. But this latter aspect of her actually makes her interesting. But in the end, she's effectively little more than a didactic metaphor for the emotional repercussions of meaningless sex. "If only you could have recognized what was always yours, could have found what was never lost." There's a universal truth in there, but it's not exactly a compelling one, and honestly I'd exchange it any day for a bite from an Austrian caramel apple.
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
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