Intimate Strangers [DVD]

Leconte describes the story as commencing like a Hitchcock movie. The credits roll as elegant, urgent feet stride along the pavement, the film cutting back and forth to an irregular pattern which we will discover to be the wallpaper of a hallway. The music builds the tension, pulsing to the urgent rhythm of the footsteps ... and recalling "Psycho".

Cut to the wallpapered hallway of an elegant building, its solid doorways suggesting grandeur and elegance. An enigmatic choice, we learn, for the action suddenly moves to an entirely different location. This is the first of several red herrings you will be sold, and which you will buy.

Leconte describes his film as really being a love story - something which the audience will recognise before the characters do. But Leconte does not let go of the tension: erotically charged throughout, there are moments when violence threatens, when you suspect things are about to explode; the Hitchcock thriller motif runs through the film like the wallpapered hallway runs through the building, allowing you access to those doors which will open ... denying you access to those which remain closed.

Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) hurries to her first appointment with a therapist: it's not something she's been looking forward to, she can only cope by propelling herself straight into his office and getting on with explaining what is troubling her. The door is opened by Faber (Fabrice Luchini), a tax lawyer ... who sits in horror as she tells her tale, unable to stem the flow ... unable to explain that the therapist lives and works just down the hall.

It's a simple comedy of errors. It's an amusing social quandary - how do you explain the mistake after you have listened to too intimate a set of confidences? So begins a comedy, a love story, a thriller.

This is a beautifully scripted story, its direction and editing carried out with sophistication and style, with outstanding performances from Sandrine Bonnaire and Fabrice Luchini. Both characters have pasts which they slowly unpeel and reveal as their relationship builds through curiosity to confidence, both parties accepting the professional amorality of their conversations as their intimacy remains distanced and emotionally voyeuristic.

It's a film which juxtaposes the need to communicate, to offer human warmth and understanding, with a sometimes caustic caricature of psychoanalysis as the lawyer seeks help from the grasping, manipulative therapist down the hall. It's a film about love and fear of rejection, about settling for the known because of fear of the unknown.

A superb movie which you will find utterly absorbing and which is ultimately optimistic and uplifting.

A distraught-looking mystery woman (a luminous Sandrine Bonnaire), walks down a windswept Parisian street. On the verge of middle age and desperately frustrated, she's on her way to her first appointment with Dr. Monnier (Michel Duchaussoy), a psychotherapist. The building's concierge, who is distracted by her favorite daytime soap opera, waves her toward the elevator and tells her she'll find the good doctor on the fifth floor. However, mistaking him for the neighboring psychiatrist, she accidentally who wanders into the office/apartment of William (Fabrice Luchini), a reclusive and solitary tax lawyer.

Immediately assuming that he's Dr. Monnier, the woman - whom we soon learn is named Anna - wastes no time letting out her grief on the quiet, sad-eyed and fastidious man. Nervously chain-smoking, she pours out her heart to him, not letting him get a word in edgewise. She tells him she's been married four years, her husband is at present unemployed, and has recently become sexually uninterested in her. His immediate reaction is an intriguing mixture of modesty and embarrassment, and when she starts talking about her sex life, he looks oddly troubled. But as the details become more graphic, he becomes strangely titillated.

He keeps up the façade and allows her to make another appointment. Confused and fascinated he, in turn, seeks advice from Dr. Monnier on how to deal with her. The Doctor suggests that William try to come clean but he can't. He also discusses the situation with his ex-girlfriend, Jeanne (Anne Brochet), and when she learns of the strange, intimate encounter, she becomes almost jealous and resentful. Gradually William becomes more and more obsessed with Anna, and believing that his sympathetic ear is doing her some good, gradually begins to fall in love with her.

Intimate Strangers is a story of how two people can, against all odds, fall into a platonic, almost surreal intimacy. A case of accidental mistaken identity infuses these two with a new lease on life, and forces them to make life-altering decisions. As their bond begins to form, Anna and William become more relaxed and open in their lives, both inside and outside of the office. But director, Leconte cleverly teases the viewer: As she becomes more relaxed and beautiful, we become just as obsessed with Anna as William is; we also wonder whether she is truly being honest and what her true motivations may be.

Later, when Anna's husband arrives on the scene, the story begins to take lots of psychological twists and turns as William is forced to confront once and for all his own feelings for her and his feelings for Jeanne, whom he still has a soft spot for. With truly outstanding performances, and cinematography that is absolutely astonishing, Intimate Strangers is psychologically complex and offers, with a subtle and restrained moodiness, the obsessive and fixated interest that we all have in the dark side of human nature and character. Mike Leonard March 05.