AllMovie

In this leisurely melodrama, a middle-aged man has resented his schoolteacher mother for decades because he imagines she had an affair with a colleague. In fact, he hasn't spoken to her in almost as long. This resentment has scarred his emotional life irreparably. Only when he hastens to his mother's deathbed and arrives too late does he get a letter from her via her supposed lover, which corrects his misconceptions and explains the scene we see at the beginning. In it, she is reading a poem to her son when he is a boy, which reads: "Footsteps echo in memory along the corridor we didn't take to the door we never opened."