A Brilliant Conflict

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

From the first few minutes, I kept turning to my wife and saying, "This whole thing is totally ludicrous. Even for the French." A woman goes to a tax expert, thinking he's her psychiatrist? Twice? And he sits there with this Gene Wilder-like look of paralyzed bafflement the whole time? C'mon. And as they continue to meet, he continues to sit there goggle-eyed and her story gets sillier and sillier. I mean, really. The tons of Hitchcock references are less homage, I think, than a wink-wink, nudge-nudge. At times the humor really breaks out and this rather tedious movie becomes more fun, but they either can't figure out how to sustain it, or the director thought it was funnier than it was, or he just can't make up his mind what he's trying to do. The biggest wink occurs late in the movie when the tax analyst is sitting at home watching what appears to be a Bogart film noir. Well, that's not Bogart's voice, and the dialogue is taken directly from a Woody Allen New Yorker piece, a send-up of Bogart films called "Mr. Big." The Allen piece is very funny -- and I think that's what they wanted this to be.

A stranger walks into your life and you find yourself totally captivated. In the hands of Patrice Leconte this is something worth watching.It is the fourth film of his that I have seen. I watched it mainly for Sandrine Bonnaire, who captivates me as much as she captivated William (Fabrice Luchini).He is an accountant, and she walked into his office by mistake thinking he was a psychiatrist. Even after they admitted they both knew the truth, she kept coming and he kept waiting for her, even shuffling his real clients out the door.A fascinating exchange, full of surprises, and well worth watching again.

No special effects, no computer animation, no supernatural forces, no gloss, no predictability.Real life! There is nothing in the story that could not have happened somewhere some time. Told with beauty, humour, understatement, feelings, sensitivity. Leaving you time to think instead of throwing one visual effect after another at you. There is time for detail. Time for silence. Time for emotions. But you are never bored.The story is simple, yet you are grabbed by it and led into its mystery.The atmosphere marvellously represents real life in France at the time the film was made. No shining up. No simplification. This is real France. Sandrine Bonnaire and Fabrice Luchini are very convincing in their roles. The behaviour of the secretary is incredibly real.This is French cinema near its best.

Wonderously frustrating viewing for me. I loved how the film was so focused upon the two protagonists repetitive interactions in Luchini's tax office/apartment. Yes, very much akin to a play but interactions that were far from repetitious. Interactions drawing me into the film in an implacable fashion wherein I felt as if I were the proverbial "fly on the wall" of the room. My feelings towards the two main characters were ever changing as the plot developed.Feeling, at first, what a sick and shallow cad he was to exploit her initial misunderstanding, then; how neurotically shallow she was in her masterful manipulation of his strong (yet, so subtly revealed) need for connection after being rejected by his more normal, and quite attractive, ex lover of seven years.I found myself continuously pushed and pulled as my support and allegiance vacillated between and for each character. How delicious to not be boxed in to a good girl/bad boy or vice versa type of plot. I love representations of the huge expression of humankind's complexity! Simplification sucks when it comes to humans.And, barely to mention the supporting characters, all rendered so precisely to the degree necessary to advance the story without being reduced to mere stereotypes. All refreshingly understated, serving to maintain our focus upon the movie's heart - the ongoing development of a relationship between two so dissimilar people.Leconte's ability to move this relationship forward despite Bonnaire's constant misleads and partial truths along with Luchini's often irritatingly tight leash upon his emotional expression was very masterful. All serving, for me, to set up an increasing sense of tension in need of resolution.As a rule I dislike pat endings that stifle my imagination. In this case I'd come to care so very much for both characters that I was glad that the ending teasingly allowed me to believe that all likely ended as it was meant to be.