Confidences trop intimes

No special effects, no computer animation, no supernatural forces, no gloss, no predictability.

Real life! There is nothing in the story that could not have happened somewhere some time. Told with beauty, humour, understatement, feelings, sensitivity. Leaving you time to think instead of throwing one visual effect after another at you. There is time for detail. Time for silence. Time for emotions. But you are never bored.

The story is simple, yet you are grabbed by it and led into its mystery.

The atmosphere marvellously represents real life in France at the time the film was made. No shining up. No simplification. This is real France. Sandrine Bonnaire and Fabrice Luchini are very convincing in their roles. The behaviour of the secretary is incredibly real.

This is French cinema near its best.

A woman with marriage problems mistakes a financial adviser for a psychiatrist. She tells him all the secrets of her life, whereas the man has not the strength to tell he's not the person she needs to talk to...

"Confidences trop intimes" is a brilliant film directed by Patrice Leconte, with two big French actors -Fabrice Luchini and Sandrine Bonnaire. The film is an intimate comedy, action is made by good dialogs. There's no boredom at all.

It's an interesting movie which shows a strange relationship growing -maybe the woman understands, later, that she has not found the right person. But she's lonely and needs to talk, at the same time the financial adviser is another lonely person who needs someone who catches him out of a boring life. They have nothing in common, but they are made for each other.

The film has a strong screenplay and is supported by the two leading actors -the scenes are almost always between them. The two characters are very deep, the intensity of their words and of their expression doesn't make you feel that the picture misses something. Because everything it's here. The film is able to picture a situation of everyday life, without developing a foreseen love story... Will the two live a real love relationship? We don't know exactly, there's the same ambiguousness which often dominate the relation between a man and a woman...

A very good movie.

When a beautiful young woman mistakenly enters the office of a grey, quiet tax expert and, mistaking him for a therapist, shares her marital problems, she inadvertently sparks an unlikely, bittersweet friendship between them.

Even when the truth comes out, Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) and William (Fabrice Luchini) continue to see each other, she coming to rely on his non-judgemental ear and he slowly becoming spellbound by her.

Patrice Leconte conjures up some of the sad, poignant atmosphere of Monsieur Hire but frames within it a much more optimistic story while eliciting two beautifully nuanced performances from his leads.

It is sometimes difficult to walk the fine line between comedy and banality, as well as hiding all the wire and papier mâché that form the construct known as thriller. "Confidences trop intimes" cunningly avoids the traps of both genres by simply shaking the constructs off, layer by layer.

The movie belongs to a genre, "comédie dramatique" ("dromedy"?) which usually in US movies is reserved for romance "chick flicks". Yet these intimate strangers bring quite a bit more to the screen. It's a pleasant relief to see them saying so much with so little, avoiding those deep memorable lines that are so out of place in the mouth of the common people movies of these kind are supposed to represent.

It's by juxtaposition that Leconte achieves the best effect, by not saying too much and underplaying it, always. In one memorable scene the lonely célibataire glances at the stages of life through his window. Through the glass of the opposite building he sees passion, argument and old age as the seemingly inevitable stages of life. His life seems codified, chosen by others and kept and controlled, in the good and in the bad: add the secret ingredient, an excellent Sandrine Bonnaire, and stir.

The film amusingly deconstructs the myth of psychoanalysis, and thanks to the great empathy of the Luchini character, succeeds in expressing the inexpressible, the desire, the longing sometimes solitary and hopeless. 9/10!

The gimmick in "Intimate Strangers" is that a young woman, Anna Delambre (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakenly enters the office of a tax consultant, William Faber (Fabrice Luchini), instead of a psychoanalyst, and tells him her most intimate secrets. The question then arises: Did she make an honest mistake, or is the whole thing a setup? Which of the two is the doctor, and which is the patient? Is she telling the truth, or is she a pathological liar? And why does he maintain the illusion instead of calling her bluff?

"Intimate Strangers" works well as a psychological thriller, an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. But it is also a meditation on loneliness and the lengths to which we are willing to go to overcome it ... or not. In other words, do we allow ourselves to be intimate with each other, or do we remain strangers walled in our fortresses of solitude?

Fabrice Luchini's character epitomizes the latter type of person. He leads a solitary and uneventful life, is obsessive-compulsively neat (he uses shoe trees, for heaven's sake), is unable to keep his on-and-off girlfriend happy, and voyeuristically observes the quiet joys and turbulent passions of his neighbors across the way. (Shades of "Rear Window".) Other minor characters exhibit similar tics: his secretary admits to watching rubbish on television while gorging herself on potato chips, and the doorkeeper of the office building spends all her time watching an idiotic soap opera.

Sandrine Bonnaire is, as always, a lovely, delicate vision. She succeeds in conveying the mystery and intrigue of her character, and yet makes Anna wholly believable.

Unfortunately, Fabrice Luchini does not lend the same degree of realism and reality to William. He is too stereotypically anal-retentive and full of hangups, and we never see William as more than two-dimensional. He remains basically the same, unchanged, even by the closing credits. In short, we never get to know him intimately. He begins and ends the film as simply strange.