![]() She was as missable in many early films as a chair: because you’re sitting in it you don’t see it. When her career began, Helena Bonham Carter seemed an oddity: petite, pretty, well-spoken, and as right for Masterpiece Theatre type films as an elegant armchair, but as dull. That Conversations with Other Women (it’s a misleading title) has moments of unforgettable pathos is due largely to the way the film exposes the emotional intelligence in the woman as if by surgery. ![]() But now they are better or wiser people who know how far they are alone. The love they had-shallow and quick-seems perfect in the past. The sex is renewed in the hotel, as if the couple had no power to say “no,” but their memories show them how futile and temporary the renewal is. It presents a film about an infidelity in which the two parties are not just reluctant but helpless they are drawn into recognizing the fatal mistakes of time that afflict us in life. I assume the re-cutting was done by the director and the writer, and I think it was an enlightened move. That mercy uncovers a picture as touching as David Lean’s Brief Encounter, though better still because these people are more sophisticated and they do have and admit to sexual appetites. What happened apparently is that in 2007 the film was re-cut for DVD and television showings so that most of the split screen was removed. I wondered if I had been asleep, for the film I saw on Sunday had only two split-screen sequences-in fact there was a third (the opening credits) which I had missed as a late arrival. Several critics at the time had admired the film, but nearly everyone found the split screen obtrusive and unnecessary. When Conversations was released commercially in 2006, to limited business (it cost $450,000 and grossed about twice that) the whole film was in split screen. ![]() ![]() I discovered that they are or were life partners, that they both went to Harvard, that she is a novelist and that they have done two other films, Alma Mater (2002) and Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (2010), which seems never to have played in this country and which was made in Japan and a mixture of English and Japanese. It won a few prizes, for Bonham Carter, and for the team of film-makers: director Hans Canosa and writer Gabrielle Zevin. Conversations with Other Women had its premiere at Telluride in 2005 and it played several other festivals. When the screening was finished I looked the film up and wondered how I had missed it. It’s crushingly neat, although I think the split screen line dissolves away at the very end so they’re both in the same cab. The split screen returned at the end: The two of them are sitting in the backs of separate taxis, returning to their lives. But I liked the picture enough to forgive this failing, and then after the sex it returned to the conversation, as if knowing that the heart of any romantic encounter (and even the reason why we attempt it) is the chance to have a special conversation. I don’t like split screen, whether it’s Napoleon or The Thomas Crown Affair, even if on this occasion it was employed to allow a little more discretion to the players in the sex scene. When at last the grown-ups do make love in her hotel room, the sequence is done in split screen: There are two images all the time, both different views of this couple, and the modern sex scene cut against the romping of the kids. I wasn’t sure what I felt about those cutaways, though I wished the movie had been concentrated enough to do without them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |