Customer Reviews
Incredibly disapointing. - By: Edna Little., 07 Sep 2008 
I found this film incredibly disapointing. There are so many superb French Films but this is not one of them. Why have the Hitchcock style music building suspense throughout the entire film, when nothing actualy happens. It^s not a thriller, or a comedy. The trouble is there is virtualy no story at alll.! A woman goes into a tax mans office thinking it^s a therapists. She tells him she is unhappy married. Then abruptly leaves. She keeps returning for 5-10 minutes each week to continue complaining- very dull. He doesn^t tell her that he^s a tax man until several sessions have passed, but she still continues to keep visiting. . Then at the end she says she^s ended the marrige & is moving away. He is so desperately lonely he follows her. And that^s it. Boring story, boring dialog. Again so why the Hitchcock suspense music.? pretensing the film is something that it isn^t.
Intimate Strangers - By: papaya bueno, 02 Aug 2008 
An attractive woman walks into an office she believes to be that of a psychiatrist & proceeds to reveal her innermost secrets to a baffled tax lawyer. Cue conflict, misunderstandings & wary mutual attraction. That's it reallly, but charmingly done with good performances & just a hint of underlying menace. Those who are afraid to `make the first move' or have ever regretted not doing so may find themselves squirming in identification with the male character. Enjoyable.
Amelie for grown-ups. - By: C. Nation, 14 Mar 2007 This film, like Amelie, is inconsequential. It's not a significant piece of cimema with profound things to say, nor is it a tour de force in pure cimematic terms. But like Amelie, I find it absorbing - a good watch - & there is plenty of merit in films that seek to do no more than that.
Again, like Amelie, it is centred on a mystery of identity. But this treatment is one of interior identity, rather than exterior.
I agree with the previous two reviewers in almost every respect. They have analysed this film so well, I'll just leave it at this & the confession that I am hopelessly besotted with Sandrine Bonnaire's character - or maybe that should be with Sandrine Bonnaire.
A minor diversion from a major director - By: Trevor Willsmer, 15 Nov 2005 
Patrice Leconte is one of my favorite directors, but I found Confidences Trop Intimes little more than a pleasant but disposable diversion. Reunited with his Monsieur Hire star Sandrine Bonnaire, it's more a conceit than a movie, a character piece that never goes anywhere much but holds the interest. Bonnaire, not a favorite actress of mine, is increasingly impressive in a superb performance that reallly does evolve throughout the course of the film, easily outclassing Fabrice Lucini. Always a rather one-note actor, Lucini is at his best here, but the fact that his character is incapable of growth - even the final move is more a change of surroundings than of character & can actuallly be viewed as a retrograde step - makes him more of a sounding board for Bonnaire than a real focus for the film. Coming across as a somber Eric Idle cross-pollinated with a hesitant Jean-Louis Trintignant, we know everything about him very early in the film, & he is never quite drawn out of his shell enough to ever become genuinely interesting in his own right.
Despite the claustrophobic settings, Leconte never fails to make the film cinematic. In many ways he's like Sidney Lumet in his prime in his ability to find a way of making two characters sitting down & talking to each other more cinematic than most directors can make a street scene. Unfortunately, it doesn't amount to much by the time the end credits are rolling. A minor film from a major director.
Another door opens - By: Budge Burgess, 22 Jul 2005 
Director Patrice Leconte seems fascinated by the attraction of opposites, or at least by unlikely couplings. In "Intimate Strangers" ("Confidences Trop Intimes"), he takes the simple pretext of the wrong door opening to throw together two enigmas & explore their resolution of the confusion.
Leconte describes the story as commencing like a Hitchcock movie. The credits roll as elegant, urgent feet stride along the pavement, the film cutting back & forth to an irregular pattern which we will discover to be the walllpaper of a halllway. The music builds the tension, pulsing to the urgent rhythm of the footsteps ... & recallling "Psycho".
Cut to the walllpapered halllway of an elegant building, its solid doorways suggesting grandeur & elegance. An enigmatic choice, we learn, for the action suddenly moves to an entirely different location. This is the first of several red herrings you will be sold, & which you will buy.
Leconte describes his film as reallly being a love story - something which the audience will recognise before the characters do. But Leconte does not let go of the tension: eroticallly charged throughout, there are moments when violence threatens, when you suspect things are about to explode; the Hitchcock thriller motif runs through the film like the walllpapered halllway runs through the building, alllowing you access to those doors which will open ... denying you access to those which remain closed.
Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) hurries to her first appointment with a therapist: it's not something she's been looking forward to, she can only cope by propelling herself straight into his office & getting on with explaining what is troubling her. The door is opened by Faber (Fabrice Luchini), a tax lawyer ... who sits in horror as she tells her tale, unable to stem the flow ... unable to explain that the therapist lives & works just down the halll.
It's a simple comedy of errors. It's an amusing social quandary - how do you explain the mistake after you have listened to too intimate a set of confidences? So begins a comedy, a love story, a thriller.
This is a beautifully scripted story, its direction & editing carried out with sophistication & style, with outstanding performances from Sandrine Bonnaire & Fabrice Luchini. Both characters have pasts which they slowly unpeel & reveal as their relationship builds through curiosity to confidence, both parties accepting the professional amorality of their conversations as their intimacy remains distanced & emotionallly voyeuristic.
It's a film which juxtaposes the need to communicate, to offer human warmth & understanding, with a sometimes caustic caricature of psychoanalysis as the lawyer seeks help from the grasping, manipulative therapist down the halll. It's a film about love & fear of rejection, about settling for the known because of fear of the unknown.
A superb movie which you will find utterly absorbing & which is ultimately optimistic & uplifting.
