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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 4/11/07)

One can argue that the French master Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Stavisky, many others) is simultaneously the least and the most realistic of filmmakers. The least realistic because all of his films insist on the primacy of their construction as films, and the most realistic because he shows a total commitment to the human reality — emotional, psychological, behavioral — within those constructions. Resnais's films are always demanding in different ways, but if you can meet their demands — which I and some of my confreres will insist are not really as difficult as some would make them seem — they always convince.

Hence, Private Fears in Public Places, which is the original title of the Alan Ayckbourn play from which Resnais and writer Jean Michel Ribes have adapted this film's scenario and dialogue. (As my colleague Dave Kehr has already pointed out, the French title, Couers, is actually more apt.) This entirely remarkable contraption has a structure that could be pinned on Arthur Schnitzler, but in fact has more in common with what GQ critic Tom Carson calls "the sodoku film" — a plot in which the intertwined interactions of X number of characters result in X number of epiphanaic conclusions. Except, not really.

In an almost completely studio-created Paris (the only "real" "landscapes" are merged into the least-convincing snow since the silent era — entirely on purpose, mind you), a grasping real-estate agent (Andre Dussollier) is trying to sell an increasingly heartbroken wife (Laura Morante) on a series of inappropriate apartments. Back at his office, the real-estate agent's seemingly saintly co-worker (Sabine Azema) gives him videotapes of an inspirational TV program she's keen for him to watch. The tail ends of said tapes contain somewhat more salacious and personal content than what she's peddling. The not-quite saint takes a job looking after the highly curmudgeonly elderly dad of a suave bartender (Arditi), one of whose most regular customers is the frustrated loser husband of the heartbroken wife (Lambert Wilson), whose new love interest is the personal-ad placing younger (much younger!) sister (Carre) of the grasping real-estate agent...

This sounds more confusing than it is, which is not at all. That's thanks to Ayckbourn's sure sense of construction and Resnais' absolute grasp of the construction. What makes Private Fears so extraordinary is not just how it completely upends the expectations that have come to seem inherent in such a structure, but how Resnais constantly pushes the boundaries of his, well, let's call it visual depiction (so as to spare those who are mortally offended by the term mise en scene). He employs all the tools of studio-bound moviemaking, silent-era to post-modern, in a way that is not only is consistently dazzling in a purely visual sense, but contains an empathy that lifts the picture to tragic heights even at those points at which it seems practically weightless.

— Glenn Kenny