The death of Jamie Lee Curtis's mother, and the obligatory sifting-through-belongings, turns up a packet of letters, tied together with the customary faded ribbon, from a secret lover. These, read aloud on the soundtrack in the sotto voce style which silly actors fall into when reciting Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost, serve first as a sort of inspirational guidebook, and then as a critical yardstick, for the illicit affair into which Curtis promptly embarks with a married man. How's that for motivation? What we have here is a quasi-Gothic premise of the type that Elizabeth Bowen, dressing it up in dazzling syntax and diction and so forth, might have been able to transform into a semblance of psychological subtlety. (The device of the discovered love letters carries a particularly clear echo of A World of Love.) Very forthright and efficient, Amy Jones, the writer and director, is no sort of Elizabeth Bowen. And the script as it stands could probably have used a bit more Gothic spookiness. Notwithstanding some snatches of feminist tough-talk between a couple of embittered female comrades, the movie turns out to be surprisingly slushy at its core. And any illusions about its adultness, should they survive to the end, must burst like bubbles when the protagonist at last gets to meet her mother's phantom lover (in a graveyard, no less) and comes away with the fairy-tale lesson that Prince Charming is worth holding out for. With James Keach and Amy Madigan. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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