Conversations with Other Women

I saw this at the LA Film Festival and frankly was expecting it to be very artsy, interesting, and a real downer. It was far above all those things. The split screen is easy to adjust to and really wraps you in, you're quite fascinated to see what these two people will do next. I loved the set up; it lent itself to a nice surprise for the audience and felt completely natural.

What really shines in this movie is the dialog...it's some of the most brilliant original dialog between two people with a shared past that I've ever heard. During the Q&A afterward, I was actually a bit disappointed the director didn't give the screenwriter more credit for her amazing script (which she wrote in three weeks). It's so engaging and natural, you might guess it was improvised...but 99% came directly off the page.

Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckel really landed plum roles for themselves in this story and I've never loved them more than here. The reviewer who thought Helena was miscast is way off in his perception. It's not about wedding sexual tension (good grief) and it's far from a chick flick...it's about the deep connection between two people regardless of time and similar to "Before Sunrise," etc., yet quite different, but I don't want to spoil it.

The film is touching, very humorous, and deeply thoughtful. You will want to watch it several times to catch all that happens.

The flirtation starts off innocently enough.Using the split screen is a brilliant device for flashbacks.

Of course, the flirtation turns out to be the rekindling of an earlier romance, which is what this movie is all about. These people knew each other in an earlier life, having had a childhood fling.

Juxtaposing one's early life against the conservative patterns that we all seem to be heir to, is at the heart of the movie.

No doubt all of us sometime try to imagine what life would have been if one's first love had been pursued.

This movie answers that question - you can't go home again. There was a good reason why the first one did not last, but one has to relive it to understand it.

That is the theme of this movie.Well done. Good acting. A beautiful actress, and a handsome lead man.

There are so many conventional movies about adulterous chance meetings that the prospects of another one wouldn't seem to be too promising. However, director Hans Canosa takes a rather novel approach with this small-scale 2006 indie film in looking at the illicit one-night stand with a pervasive split-screen process. Most often, the two sides reflect the perspectives from the man and woman at the center of the story, and at other times, we see their individual memories as flashbacks to their youthful courtship. Initially, the gimmicky aspect of watching the duality of the action is rather jarring, but it gradually becomes a dramatically effective means for exhibiting the dynamics of the two characters in real time. Gabrielle Zevin's sharply delineated, often amusing dialogue also helps to bring an immediacy to what could have been a predictably drawn situation.

The intimate, verbose plot itself turns on several contrivances, some more forgivable than others (like the absence of names for the lovers and the misunderstanding arising from matching cell phones). Regardless, it's really the adroit charm and emotional dexterity of the actors that sets this movie apart. Playing yet another rascally man-child, Aaron Eckhart adds shades of mid-life romantic vulnerability that make his character likeably flawed. But the picture really belongs to Helena Bonham Carter's richly textured performance as the woman, easily her best work since 1997's "The Wings of the Dove". As a complacent married woman who feels herself hurtling palpably toward forty, she provides such revealing nuance with each scene that I ended up wondering more about her character's fate than his. With her sad dark eyes and pouty mouth, she looks more like legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau as the years pass.

Shot in only thirteen days and with a running time of only 84 minutes, the movie is quite small in scope, but it is also a relatively undiscovered gem that will hopefully take on new life on DVD. Speaking of which, the 2007 DVD has a surprisingly robust number of extras beginning with Canosa's thoughtful commentary track. Also included are an entertaining 25-minute interview with an easily bantering Eckhart and Carter from the Telluride Film Festival; an insightful five-minute short with the director showing a demo of his dual-camera film-making technique; a helpful four-minute explanation of why split-screen was used specifically for the film; and a less interesting, more technical twenty-minute demonstration of how Canosa used Apple Final Cut Pro software to make his complex edits.

Given the way the story is told, "Conversations with Other Women" plays out as somewhat of a romantic mystery demanding a slow, selective unraveling by a keen audience. It follows two deliberately unnamed characters (a man and a woman) through the latter part of a wedding reception and holds on them through their evening together. Earlier works like Richard Linklater's duo "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" come instantly to mind. Although it might not literally be conveyed in real time, there's such immediacy to the conversation that ensues. Like Linklater's films the dialogue heavy film never feels overbearing and stage-like, possibly due to the writing and possibly due to the visual technique that will no doubt color many reviews and comments about the film. It's told with a constant use of split-screen, in an attempt to present two perspectives. Mostly the use of this style assists with pacing, and never fully follows through on the promise of conveying opposing story lines. Regardless the choice to use split-screen never becomes flashy, like it did in when it came into vogue in the mid-1960s, but it does seem more fueled by digital ability than narrative necessity. Whether it's this curious technique, the impressive performances of Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter, or the subtle screen writing, "Conversations with Other Women" seems to effortlessly become one of those quickly cherished works that demands you hang onto every word, every gesture. It's really a beautiful work and has the potential to become a classic love story couples and hopeless romantics will go to for years to come. But it very likely won't.

The film stats as a casual meeting of a man (Aaron Eckhart) and a woman (Helen Bonham Carter) on the wedding banquet in a New York City Hotel. They seem to know each other and used to be close once. Now she is married to a doctor, the cardiologist, and lives in London. He has a steady girlfriend, a "23 on August 12" Broadway Show Dancer. They seem to like each other and flirt innocently while drinking champagne, smoking (she is) and dancing. But gradually, apparently forgotten or hidden very deep inside feelings come back to life so intensely that they might (or not) change a man's and a woman's lives again.

This is my kind of film, with only two main characters, with the subtle interaction between them, when we have to rely more on their body languages, their eyes, their facial expressions than to the words that they say to each other. "Conversations with Other Women" is a riveting, bittersweet, honest, and realistic movie about making choices, losses, and regrets. Two people used to be the one world which had split years ago leaving them not just on the different continents but on the different halves of the screen. The film brings to mind Before Sunrise of course but its atmosphere is more sober and melancholic. It is not about possibility of future together, it is all about past. Both actors are excellent. The split screen technique works perfectly for the whole duration of the film. It is a very well made and creative indie picture which I enjoyed watching.