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.

Despite the claustrophobic settings, Leconte never fails to make the film cinematic. In many ways he's like Sidney Lumet in his prime in his ability to find a way of making two characters sitting down and talking to each other more cinematic than most directors can make a street scene. Unfortunately, it doesn't amount to much by the time the end credits are rolling. A minor film from a major director.