Bill McCutchen

Occupation

Filmmaker

Conversations With Other Women Review

By Jay Antani

Excellent

Try to watch director Hans Canosa's Conversations with Other Women twice and in quick succession. The memories that haunt the film's reunited lovers subtly inform every look, line, and gesture between them. For that reason, the film not only stands up to, it demands subsequent viewings if one wants to fully appreciate its layers of double meanings and shaded subtext.

What immediately sets Conversations apart is how, over its 85 minutes, it makes such fun and inventive use of the split-screen technique. The technique's most obvious function is to convey how the story's man and woman (Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter), no matter their passion for each other, inhabit disparate and irreconcilable worlds. But it goes brilliantly beyond that, using split-screen also for flashbacks, triggered by memory, in which younger versions of the characters (Erik Eidem and Nora Zehetner), play out the halcyon days of their long-ago romance. What's more, the details of these flashbacks warp and alter, depending on who's doing the remembering. In an intriguing twist, the split-screen projects not only alternate versions of the past, but of the present too -- showing variations on small but important moments either as a character perceives they happened or he/she wishes they had. It's a sensationally expressive use of a tired cinematic device, now revitalized and itself revitalizing a tired genre.

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