Last Letter (2018, Dir. Shunji Iwai):
Two decades ago, Asia was turning Japanese, as they say in the old Vapors song. The land of the rising sun was dominating the region’s pop culture in every way imaginable–anime, J-pop, J-dramas, you name it. At the forefront of the surge in 1995 was a modest little Japanese movie called Love Letter which became a very big sensation. How big? During a visit to Hong Kong during this period, I read that an amorous local had scooped up all the tickets for a specific showing of the movie so he could have a private screening with his girlfriend.
As an encapsulation of a particular cultural moment, Love Letter still retains its charm all this time later. Acknowledging the growing synergy between East and West (the movie’s central conceit of doppelganger characters is inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique), shot with the gloss of a high-budget music video, and telling a tale of long-ago high school love to warm the hearts of bookish romantics everywhere, Love Letter was unmistakably Japanese in its tone and delicacy, yet universal in its appeal. That combination of craftsmanship and canniness launched the career of writer-director Shunji Iwai, who since then has churned out variations on the same theme, some knotty (All About Lily Chou-chou) some winsome (Hana and Alice). In the process, he’s established himself as a patron saint of high school drama.
Twenty years later, the worm has turned: Korea and China are ascendant in Asian mass entertainment, both nations now fully capable of producing their own fluffy romantic dramas. Yet Iwai has persisted. Maintaining his identity while adapting to the winds of change, he continued his unofficial “Letter” trilogy in Korea with Chang-ok’s Letter, a drama that was actually a four-part advertisement for Nescafé (Iwai’s aesthetic has always toed the line between intimate storytelling and commercial slickness). Now comes a third “letter” movie, Last Letter (Chinese title: Dear Zhihua), which was shot in China. (A Japanese version based on the same story is planned for 2019 release.)
As with his other work, Last Letter utilizes melodramatic conventions (mistaken identities, deceptions, unrequited love) to arrive at quiet epiphanies. The film ping-pongs between past and present, centering on Zhihua (Zhou Xun), a moderately happy wife and mother who is mourning the untimely death of her sister Zhinan. When Zhihua receives an invitation to attend Zhinan’s 30-year middle school reunion, she arrives with every intention of informing her old classmates of her sister’s death, but when she’s mistaken for her sister, she doesn’t have the nerve to correct the error. The plot thickens when former classmate Yin Chuan (Qin Hao, a dead ringer for director Iwai in tousled hair and spectacles) approaches her, believing her to be Zhinan, and later sends an explosive text message: “I have loved you for 30 years.” When Zhihua’s husband sees the message and destroys her phone in a fit of jealousy, Zhihua resorts to old-fashioned pen and paper to maintain contact, resulting in further confusion as Zhinan’s daughter Mumu (Deng Enxi) and Zhihua’s daughter Saran (Zhang Zifeng) are accidentally pulled into the long-distance conversation.
Typically, such a setup—mistaken identities, waylaid love letters—would lead to outright farce, heartbreaks, reconciliations and a happy ending, but Iwai has more subtle intentions in mind. The narrative deliberately withholds information from us at the outset, but as we segue into flashbacks to Zhihua and Yin’s middle school experiences, a more tangled picture emerges. Caught in her more vivacious sister’s shadow, Zhihua has romantic secrets of her own, while Yin’s connection with Zhinan turns out to be more substantial (and tragic) than expected, and when the cause of Zhinan’s death is eventually revealed, it casts everything that has gone before in a new light. Last Letter is essentially about people learning to get on with their lives, as Zhihua and Yin must come to terms with the unfulfilled yearnings of their middle school days. Or as Yin, a promising author suffering from writer’s block thanks to his youthful traumas, is told point-blank: “Life is not something you can write on a whim.”
Our future is full of possibilities, but what that means for each of us is hard to say. We have to live our own lives. Dreams come true for some, and they might not for others. But I believe we’ll remember this place, where our dreams are still limitless.
— Zhinan, Lost Letter
In the hands of a less precise director, Last Letter could have been sloppy soap opera, but Iwai knows how to keep the film’s emotions on a leash. Not as sumptuous or swoony as Love Letter, Last Letter nonetheless shares the earlier film’s resonance, the sense that past and present are forever intermingling. Taking its time, the movie underplays to powerful effect even as it touches on darker themes such as suicide, bereavement, abuse, and failed lives. Iwai alternates between close-ups of his actors’ faces, drinking in their uncertainties and sudden joys, and more restless camerawork, such as a nocturnal scene in which Zhihua chases down her nephew Chenchen (Hu Changlin) when he attempts to run away, the action captured in one take. In its most moving passages—Yin offering a prayer to Zhinan (the scene mirroring a greeting to a long-gone loved one in Love Letter), or Yin stumbling upon Chenchen and Sanran, both of whom are spitting images of Zhihua and Zhinan as children (both played by the same actresses)— Last Letter strikes chords of intimacy and mystery that few films of its ilk reach for, or attain.
Not everything tracks cleanly; certain characters’ actions seem to make less sense in retrospect, and every so often, things gets a little precious. A game of telephone involving two cups attached with a string is an amusing side-note at first, but gets heavy-handed when it’s brought back at the film’s conclusion. And once you peel back all the layers, you’re left with a gently existential, middle-class love story devoid of cultural and political context. Take away a few references here and there, and Last Letter could have taken place just about anywhere. But that’s the way China seems to like it these days—if an ascending world power can’t enjoy its new bourgeois entertainments, who can?
Nevertheless, Last Letter manages to marry its greeting-card surfaces with its thornier emotions in high style. Its heart may be stuck in middle school, but its soul is expansive enough to include grown-up regrets, further affirming Iwai’s mastery of a particular sub-genre that remains all his own. “Your future is full of possible lives,” a young Zhinan says to her graduating class, and even if that statement gives way to the melancholic realization that possibilities fall by the wayside with age, that initial spark of hope remains.
