 Country:
ChinaRuntime: 90' Script : Adapted from a short story of the same title by Stefan Zweig Screeplay: Xu Jinglei Cast: Peking, 1948. A bleak winter night. A man rides through the war-ridden city and returns home. He finds a letter awaits him. It is a letter written by a woman before her death. In the letter she tells him the story of her love for him-a life-long passion that has not diminished over time, but one that he has never known. The woman’s story spans eighteen years from the moment she-then a thirteen-year-old girl-sets her eyes on her dashing new neighbor. She tells their brief but passionate love in her youth, the hardship she goes through raising their child alone, and their final encounter after the war, during which the man fails to recognize her and one which leaves her in despair. Now having lost her son-her only tie with the man she loves-she no longer has the courage to live on. Only in a letter is she capable of telling him everything, for the first and last time. Shaken by the letter, the man searches his memory for the nameless woman... To make her second
movie as a director, actress Xu Jinglei (My Father and I, 2003)
decided to adapt Stefan Zweig's novel, of which there already
exists a splendid adaptation by Max Ophüls. Xu Jinglei's oriental
point of view endows with numerous beautiful, sensitive and intelligent
moments, the tale of this unknown girl in love with an unsuspecting
man tinged with the gentle sadness and nostalgia of a love that
could have been but wasn't.
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