Am I Missing Something?

A lot of fun.

A Brilliant Conflict

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a romantic movie for easterners. Though it is underrated on IMDb, it still stands out of the genre.Yes, it is very small and sensitive to a degree that, even some of my friends(Chinese girls) find it boring in the first place. But to notice that Love Letter is a brilliant multi-layered story; a journey about several people's life experience and the ties created between them. The version I saw was English-subtitled DVD, which speaks Japanese all over. It doesn't matter because beautiful cinematographic still caught me. And so many poetic symbols like dragonflies and snow mountains really impressed me.Overall, the performances are great and they are all common people instead of fancy faces with huge cartooned eyes.9/10

Carl Jung said "What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate". For Hiroko Watanabe, the passing of two years has not lessened the pain brought on by the death of her young fiancé, Itsuki Fujii (Takashi Kashiwabara) in a mountain climbing accident. She longs for healing but is unable to let go of his sudden death. Fate intervenes, however, and a single letter she writes to her deceased lover as a whim sets in motion a chain of events that allows her to discover the untold secrets of their connection. Written and directed by Shunji Iwai and based on his novel of the same name, Love Letter is a simple but very moving love story about two people who must redeem the past in order to be fully alive in the present.While looking through her fiancé's old school yearbook after the memorial ceremony, Hiroko wants to find something of Itsuki that she can hold onto, some token that will allow her to let go. Finding his name in the yearbook, she jots down the address associated with the name Itsuki Fujii and mails a short letter addressed to him in Otaro in northern Japan. She asks "How are you? and tells him, "I am fine". Thinking that she is sending a letter to heaven, she is supported by Akiba (Etsushi Toyokawa), a close friend of Itsuki who has fallen in love with her and strongly wants her to complete the past. To her surprise she receives a reply and, after the exchange of several letters, discovers that her correspondent is not a disembodied spirit but a very alive woman with the same exact name as her fiancé. Even more astonishing is that both male and female Itsuki Fujiis were classmates together in Junior High School.While there is some initial confusion stemming from the fat that both Hiroko and the female Itsuki are performed by the superb Miho Nakayama in a dual role, each character's personality is so individual that any confusion is soon dispelled. As the letters continue, Itsuki uncovers some hidden truths about herself, her father's death, and her relationship with the shy student with the same name. Bringing to light memories from the past that she had long buried, she remembers how they were teased by fellow classmates for having the same name, how they developed a bond while working together in the library, and how the male Itsuki, checking out books from the library, wrote his name on five checkout cards saying to her in English "straight flush".Sensing that Hiroko's quest for completion has reached a dead end, Akiba takes her on a trip to Otaru to meet the female Itsuki and to search for some memento of her fiancé. In a memorable scene in which, in the words of author Marion Woodman, "the eternal crosses the transitory", Hiroko cries out to the mountain that holds the body of her lost love, "O-genki desu ka? "Watashi wa genki desu", "How are you? I am fine", and the words echo through the winter night to be repeated by the female Itsuki sitting in her home miles away.Love Letter is a film of exquisite cinematic poetry that explores the subjectivity of memory and the idea of redemption. Author Robertson Davies says, "One always learns one's mystery at the price of one's innocence" Like gemstones of coral and quartz that fill our life with joy, Itsuki Fujii came into the lives of two young women, then as suddenly as he appeared, he was gone, yet now both Hiroko and the female Itsuki have established a strange connection and are, in the words of Elizabeth Lesser, "no longer dead, but alive with something luminous and solid burning in their core".

Iwai Shunji's first film to receive high critical acclaim, _Love Letter_ is a gorgeous movie starring the lovely Nakayama Miho in two roles that of Watanabe Hiroko,a young woman who loss her fiancé in a mountaineering accident and Fujii Itsuki a librarian fighting a truly nasty cold.After going to memorial service to honor her dead fiancé, Hiroko travels with her would have been mother-in-law to her house. There she looks in her deceased fiancé's junior high school year book and discovers that he was from Otaru, a town in Hokkaido, and she copies down his address that was listed in the reference in the back of the book.For sentimental reasons sends a letter to her dead fiancé's, Fujii Itsuki's, old home. What's this? Didn't I write earlier that Fujii Itsuki was a woman? Well, she is. There were two students named "Fujii Itsuki" at the junior high school. After a dumbfounded Itsuki receives the letter, she responds to it. Hiroko, obviously not expecting to receive a letter, is happy to receive one, and, in the cloud of her fiancé's memory, believes that it might actually be from him.Her new romantic interest Akiba, Toyokawa Etsushi, although he too mourns the loss of his friend, he was on the same moutaineering trip, he wants Hiroko to release the memory of her dead fiancé and accept him as her only romantic interest.After Akiba and Hiroko learn that this Itsuki is a female, they travel to Otaru and search for her. Although Hiroko and Itsuki do encounter each other, they do not converse, but soon after Hiroko returns home, she and Itsuki begin a long term exchange of letters in which Itsuki dictates all of her memories of the male Fujii Itsuki.This a very moving film that shows off the beauty of northern Japan quite well. The snow covered landscapes are absolutely breathtaking. This movie is quite melancholy, not only because of the grief Hiroko experiences because she loss her fiancé, but also because of some of the revelations she makes after corresponding with the female Itsuki for so long. Itsuki's story is quite sad also because she learns things of the past that were not clear to her at the time she was a junior high school student.However, that does not mean that this film is without humor. Nakayama Miho does a wonderful job acting the part of the bubbly Itsuki whose attitude towards people and surroundings is a breath of fresh air in comparison to Watanabe Hiroko. A great film.

Clearly this movie fascinates and enthralls the other reviewers here. Unfortunately I was immune to its poignancy of the languid music and lingering camera and found it simply extremely slow, absurdly contrived, and with a twist at the end that is so banal that I felt cheated, having hung on to the end in futile hopes of a rewarding conclusion. Nothing happens. The beginning is also very confusing, due to resemblance between characters, until you realize that the confusion is intentionally introduced and is central to the story. If only I had realized that the story's author also wrote "Failan," a movie so excruatingly precious and meaningful that after twenty minutes I had to shut it off to prevent my life energy from sapping away. "Love Letter" is of interest primarily to fans of precious romantic films.