Burning the Letters: Amy Holden Jones' "Love Letters" (1983)
It is easy to live in a perpetual state of longing, where one allows fantasy to take over and construct reality as one sees fit. This is, after all, what makes affairs so easy and yet so painful. While they need not be physically intimate, all ultimately remain ideas of the mind. On the one hand, gone goes the responsibility of everyday ennui, and rather, that space is filled with ideas about Romance and possible futures together. However, should this future never come to fruition, or even should one go further as to realize the person one has fantasized over is nothing more than a dud, well, perhaps this might make letting go easier after all? Love Letters is a very sensitively rendered film about longing. The second feature from Amy Holden Jones, her first was The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), which is a campy popcorn flick. This time, however, she is dead set (no pun) on something more serious. Granted, keep in mind that this is a 1980s film so it is not without its flashy dream se