MY LIFE @ the movies

LOVE HURTS: "Letter from an Unknown Woman"

1.)

Louis Jordan makes for a pretty convincing cinematic concert pianist, not just in his self centeredness and dapper, classy accoutrements, but, more importantly, in his scarily accurate keyboard finger placement and persuasive shoulder movements.

While not quite in Amy Irving territory — Irving famously left actual blood on the piano while filming Prokofiev’s violently percussive Third Piano Concerto for “The Competition” — Jordan’s Stefan Brand easily joins the pantheon of authentic/fake keyboard soloists, making a nice bookend to Mary Astor’s Sandra Kovak in “The Great Lie,” whose athletic rendition of the Tchaikovsky Concerto is a marvel to behold.

On those rare occasions when I allow genuine envy to take root in my heart it is invariably due to watching or listening to some classical pianist making glorious sounds with their fingers.

I was supposed to be a child prodigy. I had concert pianist delusions when I was young, delusions shared by both my parents who’d been sidetracked from their own keyboard pursuits and gladly found in me a repository for their thwarted dreams.

My problem was twofold: I wanted to be a genius without putting in the work; and I was more interested in finding a way to get out of high school than in practicing for a career that I pretty much knew was never going to happen.

I was picked on a lot during my Freshman and Sophomore years, and one day, after coming home in tears after being called a ‘fag’ by a group of cheerleaders, and having the gym coach refer to me as a basket case, my mother and I came up with a scheme to get me the hell out of there.

She called the school district, convinced them I was the next Van Cliburn and told them I would be taking the Proficiency Exam and leaving school immediately so I could focus on my career.

My dance of joy was short lived, however, since my mother’s post dropout plan was for me to spend all my time at home with her, practicing a minimum of six hours a day in preparation for my audition for the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

Like that scene in “The Devils” where Vanessa Redgrave, after pretending to be possessed by Satan (in the form of Oliver Reed), is shown the instruments of torture she’s about to experience — in order to cleanse her soul — and starts to emphatically recant, only to find out it’s too late; I also realized I’d made a horrible, horrible mistake.

Because if there’s anything worse than being picked on and humiliated by bullies on a daily basis, it’s being stood over by a dominating, punishing mom who wants a return on her brand new Yamaha Upright Piano investment.

My downward trajectory was swift. After a disastrous public performance at an Honor Recital in Carmel in front of Haymo Taeuber, the conductor of the Monterey County Symphony, I had a teenage nervous breakdown, refused to practice the piano anymore and was thrown out of the house.

For a while, I played hymns at a Baptist church, until the Sunday morning after an all night acid trip when I showed up still frying out of my mind, and was asked never to return.

Later, at LA City College, I composed the scores and played piano for a series of musicals, but in 1987, after writing my first play and realizing that was my true calling, I sold the black ebony upright my parents had bought me and didn’t touch a piano for twenty years.

2.)

Joan Fontaine’s character of Lisa Berndle is only fourteen the first time she hears the piano being played next door by her new neighbor, the breathtakingly handsome Stefan Brand (Jourdan), but from that moment on her emotional progress is effectively frozen in amber.

Even years later, she can’t get past what is, at first, a simple friendly glance, and which later becomes a disastrous one-night-stand.

I’ve also had that mad obsessive desire swamp my better thinking. I’ve pursued inexplicably ridiculous characters to the edge of disaster. Watching Fontaine’s earnest myopic passion brought a flush of familiar shame to my face. Oh, the follies of youth.

One of the great benefits of getting older is acquiring the ability to more logically weigh the transitory lure of ardorous pleasure against the very real consequences said pleasure can engender.

Fontaine finds happiness later in life with an older husband who provides a fabulous lifestyle for her. But she is still haunted by the flame of her past. She wants to burn again. And when the opportunity arrises, she can barely contain herself.

I’ve been with my husband for 24 years. And there have been times in the past, during my devil-may-care partying days, when I thought it was my duty as an artist to seek out that which would ignite the furies. I flirted with very real immolation.

Now, thankfully, that all seems silly; as practical as drinking poison.

Director Max Ophuls really knows how to convey what it means to ache for love and to be wounded by its lack. The plot is tight, the structure is ingenious, the insights into human nature are profound.

In under ninety minutes he takes us from childlike innocence to a world weary, broken understanding. There is no villain in “Letter from an Unknown Woman” except for the cruel inevitability of love itself.

STREAMING FOR FREE ON ROKU CHANNEL