Letters Home. 1986. France. Directed by Chantal Akerman. Screenplay by Delphine Seyrig, Patty Hannock, Françoise Merle, Coralie Seyrig. With Delphine Seyrig, Coralie Seyrig. DCP courtesy Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, restored in 2019 by Modern Art National Museum-Centre Pompidou. In French; English subtitles. 104 min.
In the brilliantly staged, heartbreaking Letters Home, based on a performance of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play at the Théâtre Moderne in Paris on November 27, 1984, the great Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie enact letters the poet Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother Aurelia from her teenage years until the week before her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. We should resist the temptation to draw parallels with the relationship between Akerman and her own mother Natalia (an immigrant, like Aurelia), or her death by suicide, for Plath’s manic-depressive mood swings (“I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, enlightened, and enervated”) and her relationship with God (“I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God,’” she wrote at 17) are also the mark of a writer finding her unique voice. The genius of Letters Home lies in the polyphonic interpretations of that voice and in Akerman and Claire Atherton’s use of sound (nursery songs, the cry of swifts, the ominous rumble of an airplane) and overlapping dialogue to convey a mother and daughter speaking over and beyond each other even as they ache to come together in everlasting, unconditional love. Chantal Akerman was drawn to the epistolary genre—stories told through the recitation of written letters—from the start of her career (Je, tu, il, elle and News from Home ) until the very end (No Home Movie ).