Intimate Strangers (No Rating)
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Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) bursts into the office of Monsieur Faber (Fabrice Luchini), a tax attorney. Before a single loophole comes out of his mouth, Anna is telling him about the agony of being married to an impotent, crippled man. Faber is dumfounded and spellbound--and neglects to tell Anna that he is not, in fact, a shrink. Writer-director Patrice Leconte performs his own act of identity theft: tucking himself into the comfy slippers and loose-fitting smoking jacket of that elder French master Claude Chabrol. There's ripe, subtle comedy in the notion of psychoanalysis being reduced to its most theatrical elements: Anna needs to give her performance, regardless of the audience. And from M. Faber's side of the equation, it looks as if the analyst's role is to reenact, forever, a barely sublimated seduction. As a real shrink informs Faber, "Your job is like mine. It's all about what to conceal, what to disclose." Right when the movie seems on the verge of exploring all the metaphorical properties of psychotherapy, Leconte's Chabrolian/Hitchcockian side comes through--and, as in so many late-period Chabrol films, a tension develops between the twice-varnished directorial style and the relative conventionality of the script. You find yourself feeling grateful to Leconte for staying in the game, for not relaxing his way into movie-of-the-week territory. Tellingly, all the exchanges between Faber and Anna are photographed with a handheld camera; even the story-anchoring close-ups have a creepy internal wobble. (Matthew Wilder)
Review by Matthew Wilder
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