Conversations with Other Women

A middle-aged man and a woman - Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter - meet at a wedding. He's flirtatious. She plays along. Her husband is a cardiologist back in London. She came over to New York at the last minute, an alternate bridesmaid for a friend she used to know. The man says he's seen her before: he has a picture of her reading a book on a summer's day somewhere. He remembers coming up and dragging her away to the picnic - he can even describe what she was wearing. But what was the book, she wants to know?

There's a twist here you might see coming. And there's a gimmick you can't miss. Director Hans Canosa and writer Gabrielle Zevin have opted to shoot the film on two cameras, with one trained on him and the other on her, then in post-production they've split the screen in two and put them beside each other. Occasionally one half is taken with a flashback.

Split-screen is noting new of course. Abel Gance's silent epic Napoléon used three screens in 1927, Doris Day and Rock Hudson chatted side by side in their bathtubs in Pillow Talk (1959), The Boston Strangler, The original Thomas Crown Affair, Jackie Brown, 24 and numerous Brian de Palma movies have used the technique liberally, usually to generate suspense.

It's much more unusual to see a movie in split-screen throughout, but again, not without precedent: seven years ago Mike Figgis made what may be the ultimate split-screen movie in Timecode, quartering the screen and shooting four unbroken takes that each lasted an hour and a half.

The use of split-screen in Conversations with Other Women is an irritating distraction at first, accentuating the film's blah visuals and arch dialogue. Presumably it's meant to illustrate the dichotomy between the sexes, a man's perception of a conversation and a woman's, with the viewer allowed to edit the shots for him or her self.

Personally I'd rather have the power to fire the jittery cameraman and start over with Vittorio Storaro. I don't mind a filmmaker selecting the shots - that's part of his job description - as long as he has something worth showing.

As the film progresses, we see how the device might also mirror the (unnamed) characters' emotional separation, from each other, certainly, and more importantly from their younger selves in the flashbacks.

Still, if it's going to be more than an academic conceit the film needs to make these characters real to us, and that never quite happens: the performances are too studied and brittle, the writing too cute, the flashbacks altogether too superficial. This film doesn't feel like a movie, it feels like a play. Not an uninteresting play, but a play all the same. Maybe multi-dimensionality has to come from within.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com