Warm Letters from Home

1. What is the function of the letters in News From Home?

This prompt jumped out at me first because it is the question I puzzled over most throughout the film. Why is the viewer constantly bombarded with motherly commentary, when this mother’s child is never seen? At first, I thought we would see her daughter at the end of the film; because with each letter, the audience is given more information on this mysterious person. At the beginning, the mother simply refers to her child as “my darling”, so we are unaware of the sex of this person. But later on, she refers to her as “My little girl”. Also, we do not know why this mysterious person is in New York, especially since it seems that she moved there from her mother’s foreign country (possibly France), but later we are told by the mother that she is working on a screenplay. Oh, so she has moved to the big city to go into cinema, for her career. But even though we keep learning about this woman, she never appears. Why?

I think now that the purpose of the letters in News From Home are not to introduce us to the mysterious woman, but to introduce us to the idea of two disparate worlds being compared through the warmth of a mother’s voice. The world of the mother’s description contains family, friends, and familiarity. In fact, it seems less foreign to me than the bustling New York scenes shown beneath her voice. The phrases she repeats, such as “I know you are busy, but please find time to write me” are familiar requests we have all heard from our family time to time. This brings a certain personal aspect to the film because we can relate to the mystery woman. The warmth of the mother’s voice contrasts the cold hard city, and allows the viewer to be transported through the letter to friendlier place. As an outside listener, I can only imagine a comfortable home nestled away in the hills of France with loving family, far away from the hustle and bustle of big city life.

Whether or not this interpretation is correct cannot be determined by you or me; and I think that was the point. We are to create our own interpretations, our own meanings. While some of us may take in the information from this film and interpret it within our everyday lives, others may see it as completely foreign and incomprehensible. This comparison between our understandings closely follows my above idea of the comparison of two worlds within the film in that we are choosing either what is comfortable to us or what is cold and foreign. It is this disparity that leaves the film up for interpretation. What do you think?