Review of Conversations with Other Women (2006) by Tim H — 20 Jan 2008

They know the rules of engagement, and they know when to break them.

Sharing the screen with no cutaways and, sometimes, long takes, they must live in the moment.

Ring of an elegy for love lost when one partner grows up while the other runs in place.

When you?re turned on at age nineteen, hormones blazing, and find a partner for sex, your motivation is lust. When you do the same at thirty-eight, your incentive is love. Conclusion: it?s better to be nineteen.

Right now, though, she?s enjoying the interest he shows in her, at one point saying lightly to the video photographer with an educated British accent, ?He just wants to get laid.?

As the two middle-aged characters impress each other with their witty, self-deprecatory chatter (not of Shakespearean quality but it?ll do), they project their mutual loneliness.

Maybe a first for the talky relationship film: a no-bullshit romantic drama that is suffused with nothing but bullshit.

Large saucer eyes always seem to mask deviant behavior, which couldn't be a better match for Eckhart, recent cinema's most notable rapscallion prick. One can't imagine an actor more utilized for his boyish sleaze quality, he's also unerringly sincere even when playing loathsome creeps, which always keeps you on edge wondering if he really means what he says.

It's hard to think of a recent movie that nails the circular games of adults trying to get laid and then talking their way out of it. And its observations on how women can be as casually cruel in the game of sexual relations are quite apt.

What their sly teasing and gentle baiting reveals, aside from an arch understanding of the self-imposed but still seemingly unpassable romantic roadblocks we throw in our path as we age, is a yearning for a time before accumulated experience completely obscures the view.