A man picks up two glasses of champagne and crosses the room. One is for him, the other is for a woman. Both are among the few guests still dwelling at a wedding reception. She’s a last-minute substitute bridesmaid, added for symmetry, not particularly close to any members of the wedding party who are her ex-husband’s friends. Neither hides the fact of their absent significant other: he has a younger dancer girlfriend, she’s married to an older cardiologist. But from the moment she accepts the glass of champagne, it’s clear that their flirtation will lead to a hotel room.

She’s Helena Bonham Carter; he’s Aaron Eckhart (neither character has a name). For almost the entire length of Conversations With Other Women [siff], each is exiled to a half of the screen as the film progresses entirely as a two-shot. The effect is both frustrating and fascinating, since they’re only feet away from each other you keep wanting the shots to simply resolve, but because each is directly on camera while the other is talking, you see their immediate reaction.

The split shot also acts as a way to convey background information on the fly (although the actors in the flashbacks don’t really resemble the actors in the present), and occasionally to mess with reality — one side represents what a character is saying, the other represents what he’s feeling. Throughout, the characters know a lot more than the audience. The indirect narration is hardly reliable. For approximately the first third, more or less depending on your deductive reasoning skills, of the film, the audience is adrift, trying to piece a story together from their conversation.

And there is a lot of talking. Like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, it plays out in near-real time. They meet, they flirt, they go upstairs, they ignore phone calls. With lesser acting or a script not as smart, this could be disastrously dull. While I’m not confident that the split screen device was necessary, it is at least slightly more interesting than it is distracting.

(screenings on 26 May & 02 June)