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Intimate Strangers review
:. Director: Patrice Leconte
:. Starring: Fabrice Luchini, Sandrine Bonnaire
:. Running Time: 1:44
:. Year: 2004
:. Country: France
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In Patrice Leconte's new film, a tale of mistaken identity and platonic love, a woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) opens the wrong door and ends up in the office of a financial analyst (Fabrice Luchini) instead of on the divan of the psychiatrist with whom she had a first appointment next door. She starts talking about her problems with straight-forward candor and as Luchini's eyes open wider, with a mute expression of both surprise and excitement, we know we are going to be treated with a string of juicy discussions between two actors that only French cinema can produce.
Luchini, a unique and intense presence in French cinema—he was in Eric Rohmer's classics such as The Aviator's Wife & Perceval—, morphs into a boring middle-aged man, but injects his role with enough irony to give the audience a thrill of bemusement. The veteran actor underplays it, focusing on facial mimics, rather than on full-frontal acting, and he even dares to make a fool of himself, dancing in front of a mirror, a rare event in the career of an actor often seen as serious and pedantic, which adds to the fun.
Across from him, Bonnaire (Joan the Maid, Vagabond), who has slowly become a middle-aged woman and has managed to preserve a youthful spirit, clearly strips her character of the use of time. She is woman and girl at the same time, sometimes wild and candid like a teenager, sometime severe like an adult.
Both of the two characters and the actors have different styles and seem to be coming from two different worlds, which is what makes these rendez-vous work better than if it had been two similar actors like Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu. If you look closely, you will realize that Intimate Strangers is a variation of Leconte's previous film, The Man on the Train, in a different setting, this one tying up a love story between two characters of the opposite sex while the latter focused on the same-sex friendship between two opposite figures. Luchini and Jean Rochefort's roles are the same, Leconte having switched a con man (Johnny Halliday) for a confused woman in a city environment (Paris) instead of the countryside.
But a difference with The Man on the Train, which was too heavy-handed, Leconte'ss approach here is subtle, letting the actors take over the screen, rather than going for some easy narrative twists, never even letting the expected love story burst onscreen. This film is about the meeting of two souls rather than about the consequences of the encounter—which is why The Man on the Train failed in the end—and by keeping the spectator locked behind the closed-doors of this austere office he successfully creates an intimate but vibrant moment of cinema.
Fred Thom
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