Between action and the art house, he found his place

NEW YORK -- French director Patrice Leconte has been making movies for more than 30 years and has worked in a surprisingly wide range of genres. After receiving early acclaim for broad comedies and action films, he went on to make a number of art-house hits, including "Monsieur Hire," nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1986, and "Ridicule," which was up for best foreign film at the 1996 Oscars. "The Man on the Train," from two years ago, recently received the somewhat mixed honor of being bought for a Hollywood remake.

But for all his success, Leconte has one regret. Like other directors and scriptwriters of his generation, he was greatly influenced by France's New Wave, yet he never got to meet Francois Truffaut, who died in 1984, a director he so much admired.

"There was beauty and darkness in Truffaut's films, and he was passionate about cinema," Leconte says. "He died too early for me to meet him. In 1984 I was considered too small to really have the nerve to call him."

Leconte's new film is "Intimate Strangers," a Hitchcock-inspired "sentimental thriller" starring Sandrine Bonnaire and Fabrice Luchini. It opened in Boston earlier this month.

Leconte's work has taken cues from Hitchcock's in the past, but his films also find inspiration in Truffaut's world of romance, tragedy, and harsh realities. The obsessive behavior of the protagonists in "Intimate Strangers" is no different than the dark side of Truffaut's characters in "The Woman Next Door," "The Last Metro," or "The Story of Adele H."

Like many of Leconte's recent films, "Intimate Strangers" is a two-character study. Bonnaire plays an unhappily married woman who accidentally walks into the office of a drab accountant (Luchini) thinking that he is her new psychotherapist. With the opening soundtrack that hints of the "Vertigo" score by Bernard Herrmann, Leconte takes us on a mysterious and a romantic journey.

"For me movies are love stories," says Leconte, 56. "Cinema at its heart is about pictures, but nevertheless it is better to suggest than to show. I think the best moment in a love story is during the time of seduction and desire. In `Intimate Strangers' the two people are in the same room, alone, and you feel a strange perfume of desire flying over their head. Maybe they are in love, maybe not. You don't know, but I like it."

Leconte is a rare breed of filmmaker, one who spent nearly 15 years as a director for hire, making mainstream films that were box-office successes. Success gave him the chance to work with major French stars, including Michel Blanc and Jean Rochefort, but his work didn't warrant serious consideration by critics and film festivals abroad.

"Most directors in France, if they were offered comedies, would say, `I am genius. I want to write and direct my own films,' " says Philippe Carcassonne, who has produced seven films for Leconte. "But Patrice is more easygoing, and he said, `I like making films. It's a pleasant way to make a living. People are nice to trust me with their scripts. I am going to do it because I have the opportunity.' "

Then in 1987 Leconte made "Tandem," a road movie that is a study of male friendship.

"It was the first film Patrice directed which was his own idea," Carcassonne says of "Tandem." "He operated the camera; it was a small crew and a very low budget. It was the first film where he was in total control."

Leconte's next film was "Monsieur Hire," based on the 1946 French classic "Panique." The film starred Michel Blanc as a loner who's suspected of crime simply because people are uncomfortable around him. Bonnaire, working with Leconte for the first time, played a woman with whom Blanc's character falls in love, with disastrous consequences. After being selected for Cannes, the film became an international hit. It was Leconte's first to be released in the United States and went on to earn $1.5 million here. It remains a cult classic.

Born in Paris in November 1947, Leconte spent his childhood in the historic town of Tours, where his parents were doctors. His father, a cinema fan, often took Leconte to movie theaters and film clubs, and in 1968 Leconte was accepted by Paris's Institute of Advanced Cinema Studies, which boasts such celebrated alumni as Costa-Gavras and Louis Malle. Unfortunately, the May 1968 political unrest in France interrupted Leconte's studies.

"During two years I didn't learn anything about cinema, except when I went to the Cinematheque Francaise or the theater," Leconte says. "You can learn cinema by watching movies, not through teaching."

After graduation, Leconte worked as an assistant director, but his heart wasn't in it. "I didn't have the aptitude to learn to be an assistant," he says. Instead, he used his talent to draw cartoons for a comic review, where he worked for five years. There he learned the meaning of economy and began to make short films.

"I knew I was right," he says of his decision not to make feature films immediately after film school. "It is so important to make short movies first. Can you imagine in France young directors start in this hard business with their first feature film? They never do anything before, no commercials, no shorts, no clips, nothing."

Carcassonne attributes Leconte's success in the past decade to the fact that he works in between the worlds of art-house and entertaining cinema.

"His subject matter is ambitious and storytelling is complex, but he is also using tools he learned in the entertainment industry. You can dislike his films, but you can hardly find them boring. In most cases in France, you have art-house directors who are ambitious in their moviemaking, but more often than not, quite dry."

But despite Leconte's recognizable name among US art-house audiences, Leconte finds himself in an odd place, often getting less attention than younger French filmmakers favored by critics, including Olivier Assayas, whose most recent film was "Demonlover," and Francois Ozon, director of "Under the Sand," "8 Women," and "Swimming Pool."

Annette Insdorf, director of film studies at Columbia University, describes Leconte as a filmmaker who directs intelligent films about adults for adult audiences and is in the same league as Philip Kaufman ("The Right Stuff," "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"), whose work is also often hard to categorize.

"For me, Leconte is one of the very best French filmmakers today," Insdorf says. "The main reason he has not received the kind of adulation heaped on Assayas or Ozon is that he is harder to pin down. He works with different screenwriters and rather than manifesting a recognizable visual style or ongoing thematic concern, each of his films is different from the others."

Leconte himself is not threatened by the younger generation of French filmmakers.

"The young generation has more of a background in comic strips and music," he says. "My background was more in movies and directors like Duvivier and Renoir or the New Wave. Today young people prefer to invent movies about Japanese manga comic strips. I know it is not for me. If I do it, I will be crazy."

Aseem Chhabra can be reached at AseemChhabra@aol.com.