INTIMATE STRANGERS (103 R) starts September 10
By Michael Wilmington
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
3½ stars (out of 4)
"Intimate Strangers," the latest gem from France's Patrice Leconte ("The Man on the Train"), is a psychological drama that reminds us how sexy and charged with romance a simple conversation can be.
This tale of an accidental relationship between a troubled wife (played by the magnificently open-hearted Sandrine Bonnaire) and a financial advisor she mistakenly believes is a psychiatrist (played by the brilliantly buttoned-up Fabrice Luchini) is such a triumph of simplicity, subtlety and tact--and of the eroticism in words, looks and glances--that the actors ravish us with sheer talent and intelligence.
For nearly two hours, Leconte and his superb twosome keep us enthralled with a series of dialogues against the sparest of backgrounds, mostly William's upscale office shot on a meticulously designed soundstage set. There, "patient" Anna progressively exposes her psychological and sexual dysfunctions to the "analyst" William Faber, who becomes so entranced with her beauty, brains and candor that he can't confess his unintentional fraud--except to his own, unsympathetic ex-wife, Jeanne (Anne Brochet).
The psychological charade begins when Anna, directed to the 5th floor office of William's friend, Dr. Monnier (Michel Duchaussoy), accidentally opens the wrong door at a time when William's busy-body secretary (Helene Surgere) is temporarily gone. Mistaking William's inner sanctum (which contains both a book on psychiatry and a couch) for Dr. Monnier's, she immediately begins a sort of psychological striptease. Fascinated, he can't confess the truth--until it's too late.
More and more deeply the two become entangled in each other's lives and eventually with the problems of William's ex-wife and of Anna's unleashed husband (Gilbert Melki). Leconte admires Hitchcock's great thrillers, and like some of them ("Rear Window"), this is a movie about voyeurism, the sin of curiosity and the pleasures and dangers of that sin--in the French style.
Co-written and directed by a real master (Leconte), it's acted by masters as well. Bonnaire's radiant talent--from Agnes Varda's "Vagabonde" to Claude Chabrol's "La Ceremonie"--involves searingly frank self-revelation and sexual-psychological extremes, and she conveys that churning eroticism beneath a provocatively contained surface. Comic genius Luchini, whom many of us first met in the sophisticated romances of Eric Rohmer (beginning with "Claire's Knee," when he was an adolescent), distills a humor so intense and inward that it almost bottles up our laughter. It's a mismatch made in cinema heaven; she's the perfect sexual extrovert, he the ideal introvert-voyeur.
It's an old-fashioned film--something you could also say about Richard Linklater's marvelous recent Franco-American romance "Before Sunset." And who says new ways are always the best? In the past few years, French films have gotten more and more open in their depictions of sexual intimacy, not only long since dropping bars on full frontal nudity but, in some cases, on actual onscreen sexual relations between consenting actors.
But if cineastes like Anne Breillat ("Fat Girl,"), Patrice Chereau ("Intimacy") and Gaspar Noe ("Irreversible") now take it to the seeming limits of sexual frankness, Leconte and his superb collaborators (especially his matchless cinematographer Eduardo Serra) can still rivet our attention with something more discreet: the soul rather than the flesh.
Here, in a way, he takes his own style--the psychological acuity and witty-wise handling of personal relationships he shows from "Monsieur Hire" and "The Hairdresser's Husband" to "The Widow of St. Pierre" and "Man on the Train"--to his own personal-artistic extreme.
Perhaps that's why Leconte, at the last Berlin Film Festival, suggested that this might well be his last film about "love and intimate affairs," that he could go no further with the subject. I think he's wrong to suggest a farewell to the thing he does best, but right to call "Intimate Strangers" a kind of culmination. His actors, Bonnaire and Luchini, do go all the way here, psychologically. As Leconte wants us to see, it's bared souls as much as hidden flesh that ultimately turn us on.
