Like a warm blanket from a boy who won’t leave you alone. Lingers in the bittersweet joy of remembering someone who has passed, desperately attempting to fill in the gaps of your memories because they’ll never be able to tell you themselves. Love Letter is beautiful and tragic in its understated grief, but unfortunately these tender scenes are undercut by a fixation on men who range from petulant to possessive.
Hiroko and Itsuki’s long distance correspondence evolves from serendipitous providence to collaborative retellers of the dead male Itsuki’s life, but their own pain at this loss and how it has shaped their lives is dismissed as a simplistic what it romance. Hiroko is doubly sidelined by Akiba, a would be suitor who embodies the movie’s relentless insistence that Hiroko get over the death of her fiancée and find a new boy. It’s disappointing in a movie that is otherwise an intimate drama concerned with the plain lives and emotions of its cast. That it manages to come out charming in spite of the distasteful undertones is a testament to how far a good score and long shots of falling snow can get you.
Content warnings: death of a parent, death of a partner, forced kiss, bullying, leg injury