Private Fears in Public Places
Director: Alain Resnais
Year Released: 2006
Rating: 3.0
Several lost souls go looking for either love and/or redemption in this somewhat silly but still heartfelt adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn's stage play. The setup is as artificial as the CGI snowflakes that never stop falling on Paris - if that much snow ever did fall, they'd have to declare a National Emergency - and some of it is grating (especially the secretary-by-day/mistress-by-night character played by Sabine Azéma), but Resnais does use stylistic flourishes to keep things bouncing along, including treating his characters as lab rats as his camera looks down upon them in empty apartments or filming them with actual physical barriers between them. The ending doesn't have most of them faring very well, but a lot of their problems are of the characters' own doing.
