In the films of Patrice Leconte, what we do and who we are is often more fluid and subject to whim than most of us would like to believe healthy or even possible. In Man on the Train, Leconte's surprise hit from last year, a retired schoolteacher and a common thief form a mutual admiration society and then simply trade lives. In Girl on the Bridge, big-city kid Vanessa Paradis tosses away her urban existence to become a circus knife-thrower's assistant. And in Leconte classics like Monsieur Hire and The Hairdresser's Husband, characters find themselves in thrall to deep, erotic obsessions that to a casual observer might appear almost arbitrary.
Reality is as fickle as ever in Leconte's new film Intimate Strangers (Confidences Trop Intimes), a tale of obsession, unlikely alliances and crossed lives, in which no one is quite what they seem. It begins with a case of mistaken identity, when beautiful, distraught Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) accidentally wanders into the wrong office and begins revealing the most intimate details of her personal life to the mousy, middle-aged tax accountant she wrongly assumes to be her new psychiatrist. The set-up might sound like the stuff of pure farce, but Leconte manages to turn the situation into something as suspenseful as it is absurd, evoking our nervous laughter even as he floods the scene with a mysterious, noir-ish atmosphere where the devil lurks in every dark, glistening detail.
That's the way most of the film unfolds, as a nearly pitch-perfect balancing act of light and dark, where a scene revealing something touching or amusing is almost certain to be closely followed by a whiff of tension and perhaps even the hint of something ominous. It's a tightrope walk that this singular filmmaker has honed over the past decade or so, and if Leconte occasionally threatens to tip over the edge into sweet frivolity — as he does periodically in Intimate Strangers — it's only for the briefest moment, and then he's right back up on that yin-yang high-wire.
Much like Man on the Train, Leconte's new film is a chamber piece for two players — Anna and her faux confessor William (Fabrice Luchini) — with most of Intimate Strangers' crucial scenes positioning these two characters within the confines of the "psychiatrist" accountant's office. The soft-spoken, basically decent William sporadically attempts to interrupt Anna's rush of words to tell her he's not actually a shrink, but he's not quite forceful or direct enough in communicating the truth — and, for that matter, Anna doesn't appear terribly interested in hearing it. She's here to unburden, after all, to talk, not to listen.
As it turns out, these opposites do more than just attract. Anna finds something in William that she needs to feel complete, just as he finds a similar completion in her. The film traces William's growing obsession with Anna, then complicates the story as we begin to consider that much of what the deeply troubled woman is revealing about herself may be invented for his sake. Things are further complicated when William eventually does tell Anna who he actually is, but she decides to continue their "sessions" anyway. It's a typically wry, almost perversely Leconte-ian twist in a film that delights in teasing us with the suggestion that the relationship between patient and analyst and that of exhibitionist and voyeur are essentially one and the same.
There are obvious echoes here of Leconte's greatest film on obsessing and pretending, Monsieur Hire, which in turn echoed Claude Chabrol echoing Alfred Hitchcock, and the whole thing plays out with a cool elegance worthy of Hitch in his prime. William even resembles Msr. Hire a bit, a nondescript little man given to stealing glances through neighbors' windows, and Luchini is perfectly cast with his owlish face and perpetually puckered mouth, as if he's remembering some unexpectedly sour taste and is still startled by the memory. He's our point of entry into a film that drifts in the shadows between psychological thriller and romance, reveling in the seductive pleasure of pretending to be something we're not.
Pretending of a less happy sort is on display in The September Tapes, a made-up documentary notable mainly for being shot in the war zone of Afghanistan, pushing the hot button of global terrorism, and asking the question "What hath Blair Witch Project wrought?"
The foggy-headed conceit here is that the digital footage we're watching is the video diary of a young American filmmaker who, along with a camera operator and a translator, submerged himself into the wilds of Afghanistan in search of "the real war on terror," whatever that is. The problems with The September Tapes begin with the fact that our central character really has no idea of what he's after, and neither does the movie.
Although The September Tapes doesn't quite seem to realize it, Lars (George Calil), the movie's filmmaker protagonist, is the embodiment of the Ugly American. He's ugly, not unlike the film itself, mostly because he's clueless (an impression amplified by Calil's atrocious acting). Lars wanders around war-torn Afghanistan like some reject from Sundance, looking alternately cocky, confused or terrified, not understanding much of what's going on around him, and occasionally blurting out mock-heroic dialogue like some wooden champion from a decades-old Hollywood B-movie.
Writer-director Christian Johnstone's strategy is simple and occasionally more effective than anything this shallow has a right to be. He basically just throws his actors into volatile situations with the locals and films their reactions, or positions them in the exotic-chaotic landscape and has them gaze straight into the camera while attempting to inject meaning into lines like "This isn't the U.S.A." Lars' sporadic voiceovers are equally unilluminating, usually amounting to lazy descriptions of on-screen action that we're perfectly capable of understanding for ourselves.
The movie takes a strange turn in its last act, when Lars' mild-mannered filmmaker inexplicably transforms into Rambo, but even with all the admittedly authentic explosions and gunshots that begin to dominate the action, the silly dialogue and bad acting still give the impression of kids playing soldier in some sort of amateur hour dress-up. In the end, The September Tapes becomes an unintentional Blair Witch parody, its small band of characters lost in the pitch-black middle of nowhere and stalked by a big bad witch named Osama. It's all strictly make-believe, though, with the only truly scary thing about The September Tapes being the movie's fatal lack of imagination.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or letters@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2004.