Conversations With Other Women

In what is essentially a two-handed chamber piece (there is a brief scene in an elevator with Olivia Wilde), Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart as an unnamed woman and man give strong performances in the kind of a film which is as much a formal challenge as it is a thoughtful portrait of romantic love for the over-thirties.

The set-up is a wedding reception at which two people (Eckhart and Bonham Carter) strike up a conversation that appears to be the standard flirtation between bored strangers but which gradually morphs into something deeper. Well-written by Gabrielle Zevin, the film is a bitter-sweet look at love between people who are old enough to have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Both Bonham Carter and Eckhart are very good in their gender-demarcated roles, Bonham Carter a wonderfully worldly-wise contrast to Eckhart’s more romanticized urging. Director and editor Hans Canosa does not do a lot with the camera but rather uses the editing process to portray the two characters’ different views of each other, flipping back and forth between present and past times, to show what might have been or could have been, if only…. Conversation(s) With Other Women is in its quietly wistful way an impressive achievement.

DVD Extras: Original theatrical trailer

Available from: Madman

 

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