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MovieMail's Review
Patrice Leconte has an impressive track record when it comes to exploring the psyche of lonely eccentrics whose private worlds always seem that little bit more comforting than the cold reality thundering on around them. But while it makes an admirable companion piece to The Hairdresser's Husband and The Man on the Train, this stylishly photographed two-hander also finds room for the female perspective and, thus, redresses accusations that Leconte's work has occasionally exhibited a tendency towards chauvinism.
However, what's most compelling about this intriguing conversation piece - which essentially takes place within a single suite of rooms - is that Leconte never allows us to forget that we are voyeurs eavesdropping on the supposedly secret consultations between a psychiatrist and his patient. Not that Fabrice Luchini's tax accountant is in any way qualified to analyse neurotic stranger Sandrine Bonnaire's unhappy marriage or that she's not wholly aware that Luchini is not Michel Duchaussoy, the shrink with whom he shares a Parisian landing.
This intricate game of deceit also enables Leconte to keep shifting the tone. There's an early intimation that he's about to revisit the themes of Monsieur Hire (in which Michel Blanc develops a fixation with elusive neighbour, Sandrine Bonnaire), but Luchini's attempts to confess all to Anne Brochet (the lover who's dumped him for a gym-dwelling himbo) smack of Francis Veber-like comedy. Then there's the sly Hitchcockian suggestion that Bonnaire could be a femme fatale, who engineered the car crash that injured husband Gilbert Melki and now has dire designs on the besotted nobody, who is so repressed that he still lives in his childhood home and retains a fierce pride in his collection of clockwork toys. All of which makes the unexpected ending all the more delightful.
Aka Confidences Trop Intimes. A shy tax lawyer is taken aback one day when a young woman looking for her psychiatrist's office accidentally enters his office and begins confessing all her darkest marital secrets in the mistaken belief that he must be her new shrink. Anxious to avoid embarrassment William attempts to continue the charade. Things become complicated however when Anna's husband begins to suspect that she is having an affair.
