Suggestive intimacies: an interview with Patrice Leconte.(Interview)

At a time when one trend in French cinema is aimed at extending the boundaries toward increasingly explicit representations of sex and violence on screen (in films such as 29 Palms, Irreversible, The Piano Teacher, Baise Moi and Fat Girl), French filmmaker Patrice Leconte's cinema of the suggestive appears almost novel. Leconte's style is well suited to his recurrent concern with the paradoxical nature of intimacy amidst the solitude of contemporary life--a paradox succinctly captured by the title of his most recent U.S. release, Intimate Strangers. Whether through conversation, a