Intimate Strangers/Confidences trop intimes is a sweet reminder of what European filmmakers can still do that their American counterparts usually can’t or don’t. Adapted by veteran director Patrice Leconte and Jérôme Tonnerre from the latter’s tentative original thirty-page treatment, framed by the director himself -- “this incites the actors to really give even more of themselves”-- and, deceptively, shot in a studio, it may at first glance recall the uncut ten-minute takes and camerawork of Rope and follow-up dud Under Capricorn. An Official Selection at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the current French film, nevertheless, is seamless in a way that Hitchcock’s two were not, its few actors winningly appropriate -- compare a miscast Jimmy Stewart as the Leopold-Loeb professor -- and its dialogue sprinkled with double entendre and wit.

The movie takes place mostly in tax lawyer William Faber’s (Fabrice Luchini) lifelong office, which doubles as living quarters and was inherited from his father, along with furnishings and skeptical motherly secretary Mrs. Mulon (Hélène Surgère). Excepting a couple of brief hallway, elevator and street scenes, two or three others in neighboring psychiatrist Dr. Monnier’s (Michel Duchaussoy) office, and a single ill-conceived final overhead shot in a bright white southern suite, the atmosphere is sober and brownish though not sad, even to the tax adviser’s habitual pinstripes, so audience concentration is directed to dialogue and medium close-ups of faces.

Absent tricks and special effects, the film is noirish and sensual, without crime or violence or flesh. At its core, and a break from the Romantic cult of masterful ego-individual, is one of our supreme mysteries, the personality and its unfathomable, unknowable depths. Anna (Sandrine Bonnarie) returns Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle as too melancholy for her, and William’s life, too, is like that of the English novella’s “rather grey dull” protagonist, until the afternoon she unconvincingly mistakes him for a psychologist and bares her heart and marital mess across his desktop.

Unloved as a child by a promiscuous mother who had accidentally killed the father she identifies with, Anna chain smokes and has accidentally crippled and emotionally emasculated her own husband Marc (Gilbert Melki). Raised by his father, William continues that sire’s toy collection, compulsive housekeeping and business, and resents willowy ex-girlfriend Jeanne’s (Anne Brochet) new beau, gym teacher Luc “Mr. Muscle” (Laurent Gamelon).

At first lusterless and hesitant, on realizing her error Anna is understandably angry -- despite William’s contrite explanations. But she soon returns, more alive, radiant and colorful, delighted to continue and recount intimate details of her life, while, with his innocent yet impish hangdog face, the stuffy lawyer is an admirable foil.

As the real psychiatrist down the hall points out, his profession and William’s are kindred, in that both decide what to declare and what one should hide. Herein are the seeds of mystery, for as others offer opinions directly or obliquely, the tax adviser-cum-shrink unsurprisingly falls in love with his “patient” but at the same time begins to question her various stories. Rôles reverse, she wants to examine his childhood and inner life, and the “truth” of each individual ego becomes less than clearly defined.

What emerges is an injunction to pick up the pieces, adhere to what one has dreamed, and not let life and years pass one by. Awareness of self and others is limited, but leave the luggage shop and well-lived-in office and follow, as many Continental films suggest, the sun. That this “cure” is easier said than done, especially after first youth is gone, gives a tacked-on feel to the last seconds of Intimate Strangers. But don’t let this detract from such a fine film. Who knows? Perhaps that final hand-animated couch conversation may lead to something after all.   

(Released by Paramount Classics; not rated by MPAA.)