What I Have Written

This ambiguous story about lust, dreams and expectations begins with an unpublished novel. The book's author, Christopher, suffers a heart attack and ends up unconscious in hospital. It is during this time that his wife, Sorel, reads the manuscript and realizes that he has been having an affair. While Christopher hovers between life and death, she begins to search for clues: if, where, when, how and why he had an affair with another woman. She realizes that Christopher has been double-dealing and directs her hatred towards the man lying in the hospital bed, unable to defend himself. Director John Hughes constructs with an unfailing sense of style a low budget film where several different narrative perspectives nuance developments. To begin with Christopher's poetic author's voice which appears almost as a meta-filmic element throughout the whole story. Then there is Sorel acting like a private detective throwing herself into the labyrinths of the investigation. Christopher's friend, Jeremy, an art history lecturer, contributes his version of the individuals' relationships. His analysis of a Leonardo da Vinci painting is an important pawn in this game. Finally the Frenchwoman Frances completes the picture, with her extravagant revelation. John Hughes experiments throughout with a variety of visual languages based on the characters and motives of the various individuals. Christopher's fictive voice, in a borderland between story and storyteller, accompanies the film's wide range of black and white stills. Against this backdrop, the author tells of his desire for, and obsession with Frances. A moment later we see how he is actually lying in a coma in the uninviting green room of the hospital. Much warmer colours frame the domestic interiors, Jeremy's perspective in particular is complimented by its drab reddish-brown tinted photography. What I Have Written is above all a drama about relationships, about passions and deceit. The central question is whether the erotic correspondence between Christopher and Frances is factual or a fictitious construction? The borderline between the author's fantasies and the reality that Sorel tries to penetrate is unclear. And what are Jeremy's real motives as middleman delivering letters? It may sound like a traditional soap opera, but What I Have Written is with its suggestive, interpretive visual language a refined film with many hidden depths and an unexpected resolution.