A chance meeting between two strangers (Helena Bonham Carter, pretty in pink, and Aaron Eckhart, suave in a tux) at a wedding reception in New York City starts the action in CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN, a slippery delight with as much tension as a standard thriller, but the smarts of a literate drama, both of which it is. Like everything else in the film, that meeting is not exactly what it appears to be. Strangers they are, but not in the usual way. Chance it is, but the randomness has to do with why they are there rather than the glance across a crowded reception that first draws them together.
She is a last-resort choice bridesmaid for the festivities, who pours out her misgivings about being there to the handsome stranger who offers her a drink, which she declines, and a cigarette, which she accepts. He listens attentively, and asks polite questions about her life that qualify as a serious flirtation. She reciprocates, warily, and during these first few minutes the audience learns that she lives in London, has been married twice, first to a lawyer, now to a doctor and is there for only one night before returning home to husband and kids. He is a lawyer, once divorced currently living with a dancer much younger than he is and for whom he has less than committed feelings. During the course of their night-long, almost real-time conversation, things develop as they do between beautiful people who are far from home either physically or psychologically or both. It is a journey of discovery for them and for the audience as secrets, from and about everyone, are slyly revealed with pithy, witty dialogue of the sort real people wish they could come up with on the spur of the moment.
Director Hans Canosa uses a radical approach to telling the story by using a split screen throughout, one tightly trained on Eckhart, the other, equally tightly, on Bonham Carter, thereby keeping the audience’s focus on them both as they act and react to each other. It’s the effect of live theater, but he doesn’t stop there. Using cinema to its fullest, he also injects alternate takes showing what is left unsaid, what the characters are thinking, feeling, and remembering. He also keeps the two views deliberately unmeshed, adding to the tension of the evening and the separateness even as they overlap into each other’s cinematic space. The result, far from mere gimmickry, is a full fleshing out of the characters into the complex, infuriating, vulnerable, and sympathetic people that they are. Both Eckhart and Bonham Carter are up to the scrutiny the format demands. Their performances are virtuoso one-person shows playing side-by-side, deftly layered and utterly charming as they confront old wounds, grapple with lost youth, and do battle with the intricacies of a bridesmaid’s dress.
Amusing and trenchant, CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN is a pitiless dissection of the contradictions of the human heart, but one that does not stoop to facile conclusions, nor draconian judgments. It takes a more existential view, acknowledging that who these characters are, or any people for that matter, in any particular moment in time are is sometimes only tangentially connected to who they were yesterday or ten years ago, making continuity not a given, but a struggle, and sometimes, as illusory as it is elusive.
The excellent review said pretty much everything. Fascinating character study and the audience was both intrigued and delighted.