|
Director Patrice Leconte’s latest investigation into the anomie of middle-aged men focuses on William (Fabrice Luchini), a lonely tax attorney. Into William’s office walks Anna (a deglamorized Sandrine Bonnaire), her frustration worn on the droopy sleeves of her sweater. Anna has made a mistake: she thinks William’s office is a psychoanalyst’s. Too flustered to correct her mistake, he allows her to launch into a recital of her marital woes. A couple of sessions later comes the inevitable question: who’s analyzing whom? Luchini, who’ll be familiar to some from his work with Eric Rohmer, is subtle and endearing, like Jean Rochefort in last year’s Leconte movie, The Man on the Train. Neither an argument for marriage nor against single life (in which, says a minor character, "I can watch garbage on TV and eat huge bags of chips"), Confidences trop intimes gets better as it goes along, especially when Anna’s Timothy Carey–esque husband shows up in William’s office. It’s too bad that Leconte chose to move his camera in early-’90s focus-finding style, as if this were an American TV cop drama instead of the icy Chabrolian mystery it is. The ending is fanciful, the kind of conclusion associated more with films like The Bourne Identity than with Hitchcock. In French with English subtitles. (104 minutes)
BY A.S. HAMRAH
|
