"Intimate Strangers"

This stylish French film about a woman who confesses her deepest marital secrets to a tax lawyer promises to be a Hitchcockian thriller — until it fizzles weirdly out.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 30, 2004 | To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, "Intimate Strangers" suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.

In Allen's "Another Woman" an air vent carried conversations between a psychiatrist and his patient from one apartment to another. It was a great premise for a farce or a mystery — anything but the tortured WASP sob session Allen made of it.

"Intimate Strangers" director Patrice Leconte and screenwriter Jerôme Tonnerre use a similar setup. Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire), whose troubled marriage has sent her in search of counseling, wanders into the office of a tax lawyer (Fabrice Luchini) instead of the office of the neighboring shrink and begins unloading her troubles. Thinking she wants advice on how to prepare her finances for an impending divorce, the lawyer, whose name is William, is deep into the role of good listener before he realizes that she's in the wrong office.

But William is hooked and agrees to see Anna again. Soon she's turning up at his office to offer tantalizing — and maybe even true — bits of her story. Even when she admits she knows William is really a tax lawyer, their meetings continue. For him, smitten but too discreet to admit it, these sessions are the only change he's had in ages. He lives in the same depressingly dark, tasteful office-apartment combo he has lived in since boyhood. He took over his father's business, even inheriting the secretary (Hélène Surgère), who's part mother hen, part busybody. The oppressiveness of the past seems to creep out of the carpets and furniture and draperies. Sunlight never seems to penetrate. You can't imagine anybody breathing in such heavy-spirited surroundings.

"Intimate Strangers"

Directed by Patrice Leconte

Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Fabrice Luchini

You don't know quite what these sessions mean for Anna. When she admits that she knew William wasn't a shrink when she rang his doorbell, when she tells him that her husband wants her to make love to other men and tell him about it, when there are hints that the car accident in which she wrecked her husband's leg wasn't an accident, Leconte seems to be setting you up for a Hitchcockian thriller about a repressed voyeur pulled into a calculating neurotic's game playing. And the potential that there is something criminal or even murderous about her game playing — if it is game playing — hovers over the movie.

The problem isn't just that there's no payoff, that the whole thing turns out a lot less sinister than it seems. The meticulousness that works so well in Hitchcock, typified by his remark that actually shooting films for him was an anticlimax, can seem as mechanical as one of the windup toys William collects. And finally, "Intimate Strangers" has about as much point as watching a monkey on a bike take a spin across the carpet.

That's frustrating, because the picture is very well made. It's about as carefully crafted as an ultimately vague trifle can be. Leconte restricts the superb cinematographer Eduardo Serra (

"The Wings of the Dove,"


"Girl With a Pearl Earring"

) to a dark, oppressive palette, which is what the atmosphere calls for but is finally very stifling to watch. (When, toward the end of the movie, Serra gets to bask a bit in the sun of the south of France, I wanted to whimper in gratitude.) But there's no denying the care that's gone into the movie's look, the way the floating camera and the compositions that are just a little bit off (always cutting off a bit of someone's face) keep us on edge.

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An enigma who turns out to be not such an enigma