Just saw this again and liked it even more than I did a few years ago the first time I saw it. Leconte is, in my opinion, the finest French director since Truffaut and one of the most consistently intriguing filmmakers of the past 15 years.
I thought the film was shot as though it were a Hitchcock thriller, complete with ominous music and overhead shots a la Psycho. Of course, the thrills were all generated from the psyches of the characters but no less compelling. I liked the loop of confessional therapies that began with the initial 'misunderstanding'. The woman confesses to the false therapist, actually a tax lawyer. The tax lawyer ends up confessing to the actual therapist. The ex-lover confesses to her former paramour. All of these people need to confide in someone nominally outside their circumstances about their current problems. I loved the entire approach, culminating in the overhead shot of the two in another office and finally vanishing.
And the goofy dance of the repressed straitlaced fellow falls in a tradition of tight assed guys letting their guards down to dance (e.g. Sam Neill in Sally Potter's film Yes, as Joan Allen's respectable politician husband in his office doing air guitar to a blues tune; also, Hugh Grant as the British Prime Minister dancing around 10 Downing Street in Love Actually). It also made me recall Jean Rochefort's spastic dance to the Arabic music in The Hairdresser's Husband.
I like the way Leconte allows humor to spring forth naturally, no forced laughs. The humor emerges from the characters' assumptions and misinterpretation.
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