Letter from an Unknown Woman is a story about love that can only exist beside an object of affection—love that takes shape around what’s possible, wanting more than what you have while lacking the bravery to live without it. The same month I saw the film for the first time, the critic Molly Haskell published a brutal essay about it, on the topic of soulmates and other betrayals of repetition: “The philanderer is like the serial killer, compelled to repeat his pattern,” she said. “The woman, too, shares the pathology of the compulsive criminal, her sacred love the equivalent of his sacred vice, both thrill to the sense of superiority it gives them over ordinary unsuspecting mortals.”

The theater was full of women in fur coats sitting in groups of two and three—most of them in their sixties or older—and I sat in one of the few remaining seats available by the front of the screen, all that was left twenty minutes before the movie even started. The audience for Unknown Woman was just like the audience at Waiting to Exhale—they knew every line by heart. Mine broke, again and again, thinking about the superiority and the stupidity of that sacred self-righteousness Haskell described. She ends her essay by warning how this form of romance will wreck any life it enters. “How better to own your passion, keep it pure and undefiled, and thus in line with image of self as selfless love than unrequited love?!” she writes, exclamation her own. The untried and the untested, to those lost in their own obsessions, at least mimic the transcendent. Sometimes I look at a couple and I think I can see what it was they thought they wanted—can see so clearly that to each other they represent great risk or great reward, even when the compromises they’ve made are just as transparent.