Love Letters

Put together in the corner of the Corman factory reserved for 'art', this proves once more that Corman can beat Hollywood mainstream in any genre. After the death of her mother, Jamie Lee Curtis discovers a cache of love letters which point to an affair of the heart indulged by her mother after she was born. They trigger the need, and soon she is knee-deep in a similar heart-breaker with a professional photographer (Keach), who is married but not about to leave. Just another triangle, perhaps, but this one is distinguished on several fronts. The passion is strong; the strength is hers; the obsession is not comfortable; and the treatment is uncompromising in its head-on stare at the sweet sickness. The last film to have sufficiently encompassed the derangement of love unto death was Truffaut's The Woman Next Door, and this film is very much more in the European tradition of Last Tango in Paris than in the Hollywood one of soft-focus romance. CPea.