Dir.
Patrice Leconte, 2004, France , 104mins
Cast:
Sandrine Bonnaire, Fabrice Luchini
Patrice Leconte's back catalogue is populated by many an odd couple. Most recently, L'homme du Train brought together Johnny Halliday's hardened criminal with Jean Rochefort's poetry professor and keenly observed each protagonist's yearnings for the life of their opposite. Monsieur Hire, The Hairdresser's Husband and La Fille Sur Le Pont all feature incongruous twosomes who come together in bizarre circumstances and grow to need each other, often to a greater extent than their incompatibility will allow. The mismatched double act, that stock comedic formula, has often been used by Leconte to explore the common humanity shared by unlikely characters.
Confidences Trop Intimes certainly follows suit. When the enigmatic and alluring Anna (Bonnaire) walks by mistake into the office of tax lawyer William Faber (Luchini), she proceeds, under the impression that he is a psychiatrist, to reveal to him the private details of her loveless marriage. This is the premise for a slowly-unfolding love story played out in the quiet formal structure of weekly doctor-patient interviews. The film is concerned less with the substance of these 'sessions' than with the changing character dynamics of William and Anna, their role-reversals and inner journeys.
Anna and William inhabit different worlds but share an underlying resignation. Anna is a nervous and vulnerable individual: accident-prone, restless, always getting caught in the rain and a constant smoker. Unable to leave her childless, sexless marriage - "we should break up but it's too late" - she has no-one to talk to and fears for her sanity. William, on the other hand, a rather dull, old-fashioned man, seems to have very little experience of the outside world except as seen through the eyes of a tax lawyer. "Taxes tell a life story - it's all there: birth, marriage, death, success, failure", he reflects as one who has never experienced life first-hand. He has lived and worked in the same office all his life, the same office in which his father lived and worked. He even employs his father's old secretary (an excellent comic turn from Helène Surgère) and one-time mistress. William leads the secluded life of a man stuck in his ways who has never risked success or failure. For all their differences Anna and William both find themselves lonely through their submissiveness.
Leconte employs two distinct narrative styles for Anna and William. Anna tells her story verbally within the confines of the office: we don't see her life outside, we only hear about it. Apart from a couple of exteriors, notably the hand-held tracking of her nervous footsteps during the titles, Anna does not exist outside the confines of the interview room. Conversely, William's story is told not by him but for him, and almost exclusively in visuals and dumb shows - we see him fitting his shoehorn at night, putting lasagne in the microwave and dusting down his childhood toys. We see him alone in bed at night and spy on him spying on the apartment opposite. William does occasionally venture beyond the limits of his office - but he is clearly not at ease outside: we see him with his ex-lover who dumped him for a body-builder; we see him stalking Anna on her way home. We, the cinema audience, piece together the histories of William and Anna from their oblique, fragmented narratives, much in the same way that William and Anna journey to the mysterious unknowns of each other.
This is worlds away from the from the conventional Hollywood 'will-they-won't-they' romcom. Although the film seems to conclude that Anna and William 'won't', it does offer a far-removed dreamy epilogue in which they seem to escape the reality of their confines and perhaps suggests that in an ideal world they 'might'.
But the real achievement of Confidences is its captivating and witty exploration of the mysteries of human bonding as a strange ritual formality that is presented here as unlikely, ridiculous and terrifying. The film is rewarding on many levels, not least for its minutely-observed performances and witty screenplay that revels in the sheer absurdity of the situation. After all, the tax lawyer muses, his work is not that different from that of the shrink: "we both treat the same neuroses - what to declare and what to hide".
Simon Gray
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