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.

MartinHafer It's very difficult to classify the genre of this movie. At times, it seems like a comedy, at others a dram and at other, perhaps, a romance. Regardless, it's a strange but enjoyable film.The film begins with Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) going to the wrong office. She is looking for the psychiatrist but accidentally walks into a tax accountants office. She begins pouring herself out to this unsuspecting man, William (Fabrice Luchini) and he's just too shocked to say anything. On top of that, he thinks she might just be a client who needs to get some stuff off her chest. However, before he can set her straight she abruptly ends the session and leaves--vowing to return next week.When the follow week comes, Anna continues talking about her marital problems but, like the previous week, she suddenly changes her mind and leaves. Again, William should have told her he was not a therapist, but she really didn't give him a lot of opportunity.The following week she does not show up. And, instead, William goes to talk to the psychiatrist down the hall. He wants to contact the woman to explain the mistake but doesn't know her name--and the psychiatrist isn't about to break confidentiality to tell him. Where does all this go from here? Well, suffice to say, she does return and both Anna and William come to look forward to these sessions.I think this film works for several reasons. It's unique and charming. Plus the two leads do a very nice job. I particularly enjoy seeing Luchini in films and this the the third one I've seen recently--and I've seen a few others before this and particularly enjoyed him. Well worth your time but the dialog is occasionally rather adult, so it's not a film for your kids or mother-in-law.

Thomas_S 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.

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.