![]() At the same time, it's a daring and tantalizing formal experiment, shot entirely in split screen. You might think of it as an older adult cousin of "Before Sunrise" or "Before Sunset" - a loquacious flirtation, a witty sparring match and a mutually cathartic confession.īut that's just one facet of the movie. These two see themselves poised uncomfortably between youth and imagined decrepitude ("The memory starts to go after 40"), trying to find ways to reconcile their regrets over vanished opportunities and unfulfilled expectations with the reality of life in the here and now. "Conversations With Other Women," written by Gabrielle Zevin and directed by Hans Canosa, is a bittersweet meditation on the inevitable adjustments of adulthood. Are they strangers? Do they they recognize (or think they recognize) each other from years ago? Did they know each other at one time, but one or the other has forgotten or is pretending to forget? Here's the situation: Two people in their late 30s - a tuxedoed wedding guest identified only as Man (Aaron Eckhart) and a bridesmaid known only as Woman (Helena Bonham Carter) - strike up a conversation that lasts all night. Or run into a certain old girlfriend or boyfriend and you may enter a disconcerting time warp between then and now and some shared future you once envisioned, but that never came to pass. Visit your parents and you're instantly a child again, and if you all live long enough, time begins to curl back on itself and they become your children. In our minds, and in our hearts, time is hardly linear or unidirectional. The man says: "Time really can't move in two directions." Of course, this is not true at all, and "Conversations With Other Women" is a movie that sets out to demonstrate why. Nor does it take much advantage of the big opportunity it sets up to explore the differences in sexuality at different ages: what sex means at 19 compared to 38 how desire, lust, sensuality and love between the same people contrasts over such a long gap.Īmong the more interesting character insights are the woman's observation to the man that, "Somehow I feel so much older than you," and the general sense that the man is still immature and on-the-make, qualities deftly conveyed in Eckhart's perf, while the woman is cynically over-mature and hung up on her age.ĭirector-editor Canosa and lenser Steve Yedlin keep everything moving fluidly, although it's debatable how much the elaborately worked split-screen technique actually adds when all is said and done. In the final half-hour, however, Gabrielle Zevin's verbally agile script gets too heavy and serious, depleting pic's modest tank of gas very quickly. Initial stretch has a frisky, fast-on-its-feet quality that engages, and Bonham Carter's self-deprecating and dismissive way with one-liners amuses in a Bette Davis-lite sort of way. Revelation henceforth gives their interchanges a new layer of import as the evening pushes toward the time for them to decide whether or not they're going to bed down she's got a husband and kids in London, and he's got a hot young girlfriend. ![]() But as the actors and camera move around, boundaries are ignored, and thesps often cross the middle line to the other side or turn up in alternate angles of the same scene.įormat is further used to provide flashes of what the characters are talking about, particularly a past that shortly clarifies itself as one the two characters shared as student lovers two decades earlier. ![]() ![]() As she (Bonham Carter) chain-smokes and he (Eckhart) chain-drinks, innuendos and witticisms roll out of their mouths, and they circle one another like cats they both appear pretty good at their games - she at simultaneously warding off and attracting male attention with British-accented zingers, he at coming at a woman from so many different angles that his relentlessness is finally irresistible.įirst-time helmer Canosa divides the Panavision widescreen frame right down the middle, with one character on each side. Names of Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart could lift this from the fest circuit to very limited theatrical runs.Īn unnamed man and woman in their late 30s meet at the New York hotel ballroom wedding of the man's sister. The battle of the sexes is restaged to clever but inconsequential effect in "Conversations With Other Women." Very much a case of old wine in a new bottle, this two-hander about a couple sparring and trysting over the course of a night is played out entirely in split-screen - or, as first-time director Hans Canosa calls it, "dual-frame" - with sometimes catchy but more often innocuous results. 与女人们的对话 Conversations with Other Women 英语 影评 ![]()
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