|
CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN Send This Review to a Friend
Split screens can be useful when depicting simultaneous events in different places, or past events juxtaposed with the present. But split screens breaking up people while together? Director Hans Canosa has gone crazy with the technique, fashioning virtually an entire split-screen film that detracts from whatever substance one can find in the relationship under inspection, and there’s not a lot of that to start with. “Conversations With Other Women” turns into an excruciating bore with a feeling that one’s brain might be in danger of also being split in two.
At the core of this numbing movie are Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter as two people who meet at a New York wedding reception and at first seem to be strangers. But we eventually learn that they have a past together. Their banter leads to renewed sex, although their lives have taken separate paths, and there is the implicit question of whether they can get back together again.
The conversation in the screenplay by Gabrielle Zevin occasionally includes smart repartee but both the characters themselves are not very interesting no matter how the actors work to make them so. Whatever they do accomplish is continuously undermined by the pretentiousness of the director’s obsession with breaking up the screen. The only place it works is when their present in a hotel room is informed by shots from their past.
Most techniques are best when used judiciously. “Conversations with Other Women” wallows in Canosa’s misbegotten notion of what gives the film depth. Unless you are seduced onto his wave length, this is a film that can drive you nuts. A Fabrication release.
|