A carta
Portugal / France / Spain,
1999, 103 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Manoel de Oliveira
- prod
-
Paulo Branco
- scr
-
Manoel de Oliveira
- cam
-
Emmanuel Machuel
- editor
-
Valérie Loiseleux
- cast
-
Chiara Mastroianni, Pedro Abrunhosa, Antoine Chappey, Leonor Silveira, Françoise Fabian
- source
-
Gemini Films, 34, Boulevard Sebastopol, 75004 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-44-54-17-25. EMAIL: gemini@easynet.fr
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Chiara Mastroianni in person.
OTHER
At the age of 91, Manoel de Oliveira still operates on the outer limits of the European avant-garde. In The Letter, he takes a classic French novel, The Princess of Cleves (1678), and transposes it to present-day Paris, where its strict moral assumptions and religious fervor are deliberately out of place. Chiara Mastroianni, coming into her own as an actress of grace and heart, plays the pampered wife of a successful doctor (Antoine Chappey). Though tortured by a secret passion for a distinctly and preposterously glamorous Portuguese rap star (Pedro Abrunhosa, a popular Portuguese musician), she refuses to violate her sacred marriage vows. This is a struggle between flesh and spirit that can only, and indeed does, end in a convent. Oliveira courts the ridiculous in his portrayal of this outsized passion, drawing constant contrasts between unwieldy emotions and the cool, contained, contemporary setting. Yet, as in his masterpiece Francisca (1981), it’s the disparity between style and content that communicates the real scale of the drama, suggesting that no artificial narrative technique could possibly convey the real depth of human feeling.
—Dave Kehr
FACTOID #210
When Ginger Rogers appeared for a tribute at the SFIFF in 1984 (’sporting hair with the color and richness of whipped butter,’ wrote the Examiner), she shocked the packed Castro Theatre crowd at her 1984 tribute when she griped, ’The filthy mouths we’re hearing in films today’I won’t pay to see these movies. I’d rather stay home and make jam.’
