Formalistic experiments like the stagy split-screen technique used throughout Conversations With Other Women are inherently risky; invariably, for every viewer caught up in the gimmick, there'll be another who finds it pretentious and feels it interferes with the story. Fortunately, Conversations With Other Women doesn't have a whole lot of story to interfere with. It simply follows one long encounter between Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter, who meet at a wedding and begin a lengthy social negotiation that pointedly leans in the direction of a hotel-room assignation.
Screenwriter Gabrielle Zevin follows her leads through will-they-or-won't-they verbal sparring and power exchanges reminiscent of Closer. Meanwhile, director Hans Canosa (who previously partnered with Zevin on Alma Mater) follows them with multiple cameras, split-screening the conversations from complementary angles and perspectives, though he sometimes uses half the screen for a flashback, or to take the action elsewhere. The effect is distracting, but it's also strikingly intimate and voyeuristic, like studying a series of X-rays taken from all sides of a subject's body. Canosa gets in close, peering in separately at Eckhart and Carter's facial expressions one moment, contrasting her perspective with his the next. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of following Canosa's direction—which angles he's picking and why, what one shot shows that the other conceals—instead of following the action. In effect, Canosa keeps reminding viewers how to be aware of the camera and the artificiality of filmcraft.
Meanwhile, Eckhart delivers a complicated performance, veering from aggressive to abashed, and stopping at puppy-eager, jealous, and conflicted along the way. When he starts spinning a story about a previous encounter between himself and Carter, it initially sounds fictional, somewhere between wishful thinking and a bedroom role-playing game, and his mercurial nature makes it intriguingly difficult to tell which. By contrast, Carter is opaque, sullen, and generally less interesting, but she at least keeps up her end of the tension until the film's minor twists unfold and the energy leaks out of the proceedings. Canosa's grainy digital-video cinematography is flat and unappealing, and his "dual-frame" method seems as mannered and gimmicky as a Peter Greenaway film, or Mike Figgis' similar split-screen outing Timecode. But as experiments go, Conversations is well-calculated and well-ordered, and it manages an equilibrium that a science lab would envy.