About two-thirds of the way into this movie, there was a twist that really made me sit up. I'm not talking about Mathilde May's nude scene - not that it didn't command attention in its own way - I mean a plot twist you just don't see coming.
The story is set in Nazi occupied France during WW2. Gervais (Yves Beneyton), an escaped French prisoner of war assumes the identity of his dead buddy, Bernard (Ralph Bates). Bernard had been exchanging letters with Helene (Cherie Lunghi) a woman he had never met, and a long-distance romance had blossomed.
The new Bernard turns up at Helene's apartment and is accepted - or so it seems. Also sharing the small flat is Helene's half-sister Agnès (Mathilda May); the sisters don't get on; you just know there will be problems. After some activity between the bedrooms, comes the plot zinger.
The two Frenchmen who wrote the story: Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, also wrote the original stories for Clouzot's "Les Diabolique" and Hitchcock's "Vertigo", and look at the twists in those films. Maybe two heads are better than one when it comes to clever plots. The story was filmed once before in 1957 (in French).
Made in 1986, production-wise "Letters to an Unknown Lover" has a fair recreation of wartime Paris, but director Peter Duffel was no Hitchcock; the whole thing is shot in a very straightforward manner. The score is also rather lightweight with little real feeling for the mood - Bernard Herrmann it is not.
Despite this, the story gets you in, and whenever the stunning Mathilda May enters the scene, the film's faults just fade away. Anyway, the revelations along the way are definitely worth the wait.
