Conversations with Other Women

Hans Canosa's film runs in split screen from beginning to end. At a wedding reception in New York a man in his late thirties starts talking to a bridesmaid, and as the apparently flirtatious conversation goes on it becomes clear that they are not strangers but were once married. The split screen is not a stunt but the film's idea. Two people in the same room at the same moment never combine into one frame; the format holds them apart, and between them appear images out of the past, their younger selves, possibilities that did not happen. Now and then the actors cross out of their own half into the other. Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter play the two, and neither is named. Gabrielle Zevin wrote the screenplay. Bonham Carter won Best Actress at the Tokyo film festival in 2005 for the role. It runs eighty-four minutes and consists almost entirely of talk. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and relationship films built on dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the split screen wearing, or who wants event.