The Movie of Letters Home (1986): Four Stars Out of Five

Letters Home (1986)

Directed by Chantal Akerman

In French with English subtitles. 104 minutes

Playing on Mubi.com; free viewing with a 7-day trial

 

Sit through the first few minutes of the film Letters Home and it will get better. I could not believe that playing over the opening credits of Letters Home was the old English nursery rhyme/street song “Hot Cross Buns,” repeated until my initial shock and distaste gave way and the lyric came through: “If you have no daughter, give them to your son.”

 

Realizing the song must refer somehow to Sylvia and Aurelia Plath, I began to overthink it. Street vendors sold hot-cross buns on Christian Good Fridays and still do. The song is short, simple, cloying, rhyming. Female voices sing it in English for a French-language film; the song, attested from the eighteenth century, is in the public domain. It asks for pennies. The song is—it’s—it’s trivial! It’s trivializing Sylvia Plath!

Outraged but unable to think of any music I might prefer in its place, reason at last stripped away from my thinking all but the plainest facts about Sylvia Plath. She was human, a child, flesh and bone and fat, a daughter and sister in a family that earned its daily bread. She had heard the banalities all children hear, and those that young women hear (cue Brenda Lee singing her hit “I’m Sorry”). Sylvia married, had children, and died, and that is ordinary too. Eventually it gets through to me that the film is not about a legend but about a life.

Then I hear the typewriting. We are shown a small stage. It will be a filmed play. A Sylvia figure, in near-silhouette, scampers in, wearing a bronze-colored strapless top and tulle skirt, fairylike except that her feet pound the bare floor. The backdrop is blue sky with white clouds. Oh, no, I thought. The cliches . . . of arty videos made in 1986, their colors now faded and mossy, aqueous . . . Having said nothing, Sylvia scampers off, and I am about to click away . . .

Then arrives, like a great ship in a harbor, a middle-aged Aurelia in a chic skirt suit, pumps, and pearls, blond hair in a perfect French roll. She seats herself, faces the camera and in French (because it’s a French movie) first thanks Warren and Margaret Plath, and Ted Hughes for giving copyright permission, and dedicates her book to her grandchildren Frieda, Nicholas, Jennifer, and Susan: real people. These are in fact the opening words of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play Letters Home (1979); this movie, based on the Paris production, is its only filmed version. Immediately, then, there is tension between the real and the dramatized, embodied in the Aurelia figure.

Act II: “We can hardly see each other over the mounds of diapers and demands of babies”

Playing the Aurelia role is European-avant-garde actor Delphine Seyrig, star of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), later the founder of a feminist film collective and a director herself. Letters Home director Chantal Akerman had at age 25 directed Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), (“the first masterpiece of the feminine in cinema” –New York Times). Akerman’s News From Home (1976) featured her own mother’s letters mailed from Belgium to New York where young Akerman was living on the cheap and making experimental films. English speakers might not recognize these names. But be assured that the film knows exactly what it is doing, and after the first few minutes it reveals what a good play Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote and what an intense movie Akerman made from Aurelia Plath’s edit of Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home (1975).

Because the two actors voice only the written words of Aurelia and Sylvia Plath, viewers can sense what it was like to live Sylvia’s life but also how it might have felt to receive  these letters churning with anxiety and pathos and giddy with Sivvy’s love, not for her mother—love cannot grow in this desert of a stage set—but for fairy-tale moments such as Maureen Buckley’s coming-out party, the scene that will hook you. In the stage play and film, mother and daughter, in a verbal duet, revel in Sylvia’s lyrical retelling (“There is a sudden glorying in womanhood, when someone kisses your shoulder and says ‘You are charming’. . .”). Later, though, when Sylvia rhapsodizes about being Mrs. Edward James Hughes, Aurelia, having been Mrs. Otto Emil Plath, knows better. As Sylvia expends the energy of her one and only life on her husband, her bébés, and country house, the soundtrack writhes: more nursery songs, Charlie Parker’s sax, crying infants, snippets from classical music, while Sylvia articulates for her mother her ambitions and troubles.

There are no poems in the script. Every word is from Sylvia’s letters as they appear in the book Letters Home and from Aurelia’s preface and headnotes. In another stage production each character sat at her own desk, suggesting Aurelia too was a writer. The script gives them equal face time. This annoyed some critics. We go to Letters Home for Sylvia and only Sylvia. Yet once in a while the drama Letters Home makes us see and hear her mother. Or Sylvia addresses her brother Warren, reminding us that Sylvia came from a home and a family. Like most people, while wanting independence from her family, she replicates it.

“I am so happy, so encouraged!” Act II

Coralie Seyrig, Delphine’s real-life niece, plays Sylvia Plath, the forces that shaped her expressed with clever costumes: A button-front dress with earrings and a pillbox hat for a month in New York becomes a bathrobe for the summer of 1953. The Sylvia of Act II wears a braid. Aurelia, though, never alters. She pages through letters and photo albums, even while grieving is cucumber-cool, as we know Aurelia Plath was not. In summer 1962 a humiliated Sylvia sends Aurelia away and enforces the distance. With an ocean of space between them, for a time they talk over one another, helpless not to. Then there is only Aurelia left to speak her daughter’s words.

With Goldemberg’s script in hand, I can tell you that the movie makes deletions, mostly in Act II, largely from script pages 24 and 26, referring to Smith College in 1954 and 1957. They are good deletions.

• Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) directed 40 films, created artworks, wrote books, and taught. Personally, Akerman was so enmeshed with her mother, a Holocaust survivor, she lived only a year after her mother’s death, dying of suicide at 65. Letters Home is not mentioned in critical works or obituaries. It seems to have been a made-for-television movie.

• Rose Leiman Goldemberg (b. 1928), playwright, had her greatest international success with the Plath stage play Letters Home and as a screenwriter, notably of the made-for-television movies The Burning Bed (1984, starring Farrah Fawcett) and Stone Pillow (1985, starring Lucille Ball). The acting edition of Letters Home: A Drama by Rose Leiman Goldemberg is available here.

N.B. Yes, I caught on the soundtrack in Act II the German lyric “mit ein Schiessgewehr” [lit., “with a gun”], from a children's song that says never to play with a gun; it might be loaded.