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Writer's pictureColin Munro Wood

'The Last Letter From Your Lover' Portrays the Intelligence of Women and Love

By Colin Munro Wood

Shailene Woodley and Joe Alwyn embrace with foreheads and noses touching in promo photo for 'The Last Letter From Your Lover'. Trees and am apartment building in background on left.
'The Last Letter from Your Lover' STUDIOCANAL / NETFLIX

I've always loved films that empower intelligent women since I was a young boy. I didn't know what to expect from 'The Last Letter From Your Lover', but it only took a small amount of viewing time to realize that this was a film I would love. Here's why you will, too.


Synopsis

Within the first 20 minutes of the film, once you meet Jennifer's Journalism friend, it is obvious what the story will entail, but this film is not your typical triangle love story.


"Boot" is the Journalist, and he is every woman's, and let's be fair here, he is also every gay man's dream. From the start, he is a listener, and friend, a partner, and the kind of man that knows how to treat his lover right.


Hold on now. Jennifer is married to a very wealthy man, and when the film begins we meet Jennifer as she returns to the mansion they live in from the hospital. She has memory loss, and like other stories of this sort, begins to try and piece her past together, and find the answer to who she was prior to the accident she endured.


When her husband begins to treat her with shadowed disdain, and control, Jennifer naturally feels something is amiss, although that is not made apparent. Meanwhile, a reporter has been put on the story of a news guru who passed away, and she begins by looking into archives, mistakenly discovering a letter from Boot to his lover.


The husband and the present story seem to disappear for some time as we watch the relationship develop between Jennifer and Boot, mixed with scenes of the reporter working on her story. Of course, they somehow entangle each other. Like many movies recently, the use of flashbacks and foreshadowing form the base of this love and affair story.


"I'm afraid that if I let myself go, I'd love you so much it would consume me." Eventually, her love for Boot consumes Jennifer enough that she leaves her ring behind, and has Felipe, her driver, head to the train station to meet her lover and leave for Manhattan for a new job he has taken. Jennifer doesn't make it.


The story turns back to the future and the modern journalist who has fallen into the romance of the letters and the old story while facing her own task of a possible new relationship of her own with the gentleman who handles archives at her organization.


You will have to watch to learn what happens from here.


A Personal View of the Growing Empowerment of Women in Relationships


I hope, most of us understand history, and the misguided and misogynist treatment of women, and particularly related to this film, the understatement by men of female empowerment through the ages.


Unrelated to the film, a brief admittance of being one of these types of men in certain times of my life, I feel, is required as solid background that I can recognize the psychology behind relationships, and only one of the situations and personalities that can tear a beautiful love, apart.


I raise this issue outwardly and honestly, because, as most of us realize, history shows that men have dominated up until the late 20th Century. Considering the women's movement began in the early 1900s, it is hard to believe that society took another 100 years, approximately to give women their due respect.


Women have historically been treated as inferior, the child-rearer, and the homemaker. That began to break down in the late 1800s as female empowerment began to take hold. We can look upon the earlier Harriet Tubmans, the Susan B. Anthony's, and ....... and understand that the term of equality has a much deeper meaning than humans ever understood, including America's Founding Fathers.


Incredibly, though, we have examples of women in power with strength and leadership skills, more powerful than men in B.C. Biblical times. Think of Ruth. How about Esther? These women's stories were told for a reason. However, men went on to ignore the great power and unique special qualities of women, and their leadership, despite the long and glorious reign of Cleopatra.


I can only think of one woman who exemplified true weakness in a time that the world faced turmoil and destruction and that was Hitler's female partner, Eva Braun. Eva let the world down. She was in a position of great power, without realizing it.


No one really knows what Hitler's sexuality entailed, but he allowed this woman in his life for a long time, up to the end, and that should naturally lead someone to believe she could have had some control over his agreements and decision considering his war actions.


It may seem strange to mention Eva Braun, but when it comes to famous women in positions of power, I can hardly think of one that didn't step up to an unfathomable task of questioning and nudging the accepted norm of their time.


We can put Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, and female leaders throughout history from around the world into this category, and come to a solid understanding that these women were stronger than so many male counterparts history has praised, as well.


We are lucky this day in age, though. We have films, like 'The Last Letter From Your Lover' to give us examples of women who created new paths, better treatment, and a fuller open understanding that women are much more intelligent, powerful, and stronger then many people give them credit for.


Maybe when you watch the film, you don't catch or see what I'm explaining, but it really is the power behind the film.


Men must stop treating women as a lower, softer, or weaker gender, and realize that the creation of birth, the power to walk away from anything bad, and the ability to forge through and succeed in whatever a woman sets out to endure is just as important anything men can do in modern times.


We don't live in the era of brute force anymore. We live in an era of intelligence, a new world consciousness of goodness and respect, and those are the characteristics that will help humans advance, empower themselves, and survive.



 

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