Console best movie i've ever seen.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

bandw If you are a tax attorney and a beautiful woman walks into your office and starts telling you intimate details about her marriage, it is perfectly understandable that you might easily mistake her for a client. This is what happens to William (Fabrice Luchini) when Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) walks into his office, having mistaken him for a psychiatrist. It takes the enraptured William a while to realize what the confusion is, but the meeting is over before he can come clean. Having this comely woman in his office probably dampened his desire to come clean anyway. In fact, it is not until the third meeting before he confesses the truth, by which time Anna has already figured it out. The interesting twist is that she still comes to regular meetings, and that begins the relationship that drives the plot for the rest of the movie.Luchini has the perfect demeanor for playing the buttoned down tax attorney who is obviously smitten but retains a professional reserve. There is a wonderful scene that has Luchini doing an uninhibited solo dance in his apartment to Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour" that shows that there is bit of a wild man behind William's composed exterior. That scene alone is worth the price of admission. Complexities develop as the spouses are introduced and William seeks the advice of the psychiatrist that Anna originally thought she was seeing.This movie has a very clever script that has humor, suspense, drama, tenderness, and human insight. I like the result that simply listening to a Anna's troubles was therapeutic for her (and for William as well). Maybe he could just as well have been a psychiatrist.The main message being delivered is that it is not necessary to make the beast with two backs to have an intense sexual relationship.

mar3429 Intimate Strangers is one of the most unique love stories that I have viewed in my life. It features two lonely individuals--one who has no one to talk and another who is an accomplished listener who will not say and cannot say what is on his mind.Mr. Faber, the tax attorney pressed into service as a therapist due to a case of mistaken identity ,reveals himself as being terribly repressed. He is a good man. He is honest, honorable, well-ordered and caring. He is also utterly incapable of either making the first move or of forcing a choice, as his off-and-on girlfriend Jeanne reminds him. This appears to be the reason that the two of them cannot make their romance a permanent one. She is aware of his attributes but cannot forgive his flaws. Indeed, some her actions with her new boyfriend and Mr. Faber seem calculated to force a response. She would prefer William Faber, but wishes him to claim her. He cannot.Throughout the film, William Faber makes an inviting target. He is a closed individual, but only marginally more so than the other characters in the film. The other characters just hide it better. They are just as lonely and just as stuck as Faber. At one point he reminds Jeanne that when he first met her she was going to be a novelist, instead she contented herself with filing and stacking books away at a library. Jeanne appears thunderstruck when he slaps her across the face with that intimate secret. Nonetheless, you do find yourself wondering how Faber got to be Faber. The fact that one of the main characters remains shrouded in mystery is the one weakness of this otherwise excellent film.Anna, Faber's patient/doctor is the focus of the film and she gives an excellent performance. I call her patient/doctor because her relationship with Faber is symbiotic. During the course of the film the two of them heal one another. Unlike Faber, Anna is aware of the dynamics between them and its nature. At one point a patient of Dr. Monnier asks Anna about her therapist. "I'm his only patient. He needs me," Anna responds. In fact, for much of the film, the true question is just how aware if Anna? A missing memento and a going away gift to Mr. Faber call into question whether Anna has launched him upon a quest, one where he can ultimately prove that there was something more to their meetings than two lonely people talking. Or is it just happenstance?Reading some of the comments of other viewers of this film I find that many are disappointed that Mr. Faber did not have more of an arc to his character. I would submit that it seems so small because he had so very far to go. The changes evidenced at the end of the film, while modest, were monumental for him. Like others, I was disappointed when given a chance to explain why he had sought her out he fudged the answer. However, as the credits rolled I watched him traverse the greatest distance in his life. He moved from his chair, to a table to pick up an ashtray, to sit on the couch beside Anna and share a cigarette together. A first move. Surely Anna will know what to do with that!See me...Feel me...Touch me...Heal me...All in all this is a great film.

MagicStarfire **WARNING THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS** 4 stars out of 10.That is, this review would contain spoilers if the film had any plot, and if anything had ever happened in the film.This French film intriguingly teases us, but it never really comes to anything.It begins with an interesting premise, a somewhat attractive woman has an appointment with a psychiatrist, but she mistakenly goes to the office door of a tax attorney who is in the same building.Once there, she begins to tell him of her marital woes, and at first he doesn't realize the mistake she has made, since he frequently hears personal tales from his clients that are similar to hers.Eventually the truth comes out, but she continues to come and see him, and they continue to talk, again and again and again and again.Then finally, when we are at least halfway into the film, her husband, Marc, shows up at the attorney's office. This confrontation doesn't come to anything and neither does the one or two others that occur between the tax attorney and the husband.Apparently, a deeply troubled person can confide to a tax attorney and get just as much help as they would if they went to a qualified psychologist, at least if we are to judge from this film.Finally we learn that the somewhat prim and proper tax attorney is in love with Anna, but again it comes to nothing. He never tells her he is in love with her, and no intimacy or anything even remotely romantic or sexual ever occurs between the two of them.They break off their "therapy-type" sessions for awhile, but by the end of the film they have resumed them.

roland-104 Patrice Leconte is fascinated by offbeat, enigmatic, eccentric relationships. Most of all, he likes to film quirky love stories. "Monsieur Hire" (1989), was adapted from a Georges Simenon novel about a forlorn voyeur who is obsessed by a beautiful young woman he watches constantly from afar. "The Hairdresser's Husband" (1990)is the story of a drifter, a man with a passion for women barbers that began in childhood, who finally fulfills his dream.In "The Girl on the Bridge" (1999), a down and out carnival knife thrower and a striking young woman save each other from suicide. And in "Felix and Lola" (2001), another carney with dubious prospects is attracted to a seductress with questionable loyalties. Even in "The Widow of St. Pierre" (2000), arguably his best film, although the story focuses to a degree on the connections between two men, their tie owes its existence to the more substantive relationship each has with the same woman.Certain themes keep resurfacing in this corpus. The men are always middle aged, shopworn by responsibilities, personal habits or life itself. The women are attractive, sexy, mysterious and bold. More bold than the men, who tend toward reticence and inhibition. The women also seem more influential, if not stronger. They are able to discern and open up closed places within the psyche of these men, while at the same time the women remain enigmatic to their devoted consorts. A sexual relationship seems less important than the man's fascination with the enigma of the woman, and her ability to evoke hidden aspects within the man.Now we have Leconte's latest offering, "Intimate Strangers." The story revives all the familiar Leconte themes. It even stars Sandrine Bonnaire, who also played the young woman that so captivated M. Hire in Leconte's film 15 years earlier. Here she is cast as Anna, a dyslectic, depressed, mysterious and powerful Parisian beauty who seeks psychiatric help for marital troubles.On the day of her first appointment with a psychoanalyst, she gets the directions to his office wrong and ends up spilling out her problems to an upscale tax accountant, William Faber (Fabrice Luchini, a French comedian), who at first mistakes her for a new tax client. Her husband Marc has withdrawn emotionally from her, Anna tells Faber; he refuses sex or affection. She wants help to restore their former harmony.The plain, fastidious Faber is so retiring, surprised, and spellbound by this lovely woman, that he cannot collect himself enough to stop and redirect Anna, who pretty much runs the conversation and ends by asking for a second appointment, which William reflexively consents to. He tries to square things at this second meeting, but Anna dismisses his claim not to be a doctor by saying she is well aware that not all analysts hold doctorates. After she leaves, Faber dashes off down the hall to consult the real analyst about what to do now. These doings set the stage for an amusing romantic comedy. It's one that takes a few good natured pokes at psychoanalysis. But as events unfold, one might easily conclude that this story could represent an analyst's most enjoyable fantasy, a therapist's deluxe wish fulfillment: having your patient and helping her too, while getting all the good lines, the fees, immunity from ethics charges, and a free lunch into the bargain. My rating: 8/10 (B+). (Seen on 08/17/04). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.