This is an expanded excerpt from an e-mail I sent to Dan, who says
that the lost note is "melodrama as formal device," signifying that
the sisters aren't destined to get together.

<<The note provoked the most discussion last night ...In my talk I
compared it to the necklace in Story of Spring (and Rohmer's
inspiration, the necklace in Pather Panchali), both of which are
revelations, and said its meaning was open to conjecture: an anti-
revelation.

One woman who is the head of the Poets League [?] told Strawn and me
that it made her feel the way she used to feel seeing Bergman films
and hasn't since he stopped making them: the way the film bears down
relentlessly on the characters, stripping away their pretenses, but
does it calmly.

It is very constructed, with all those frames within the frame,
squares and rectangles throughout the first half, then that green
patch in the middle: sitting on the lawn, walking thru the woods, at
the picnic. No blocky shapes in the bg -- but that's ironically when
Virginia bears down most cruelly on Evelyn. Then the ending, where
merging effects happen a bit -- leading sound with Strawn's voice and
the radio, the slow dissolve from a moving shot a la Morocco. The
mother's phrase could apply to the sisters' time together: "a failed
experiment."

Watching and listening to Strawn and Edith Meeks is like listening to
two great jazz soloists jamming, in perfect tune with each other
(although obviously they aren't making up the words). You feel for
Virginia when Evelyn abandons her for the second time, but can never
overlook her cruelty, which drives Evelyn away. Blake said the fact
that we are allowed to see something only God sees -- the note
blowing away -- just underlines the myopia of the two characters.

My comment after both screenings was "Woody Allen would cut off his
right arm to be able to make a film like this, but he doesn't have
the intelligence, the taste or the actresses." Many things dictated
the comparison, most obviously the music on the radio at the end.>>