One of the best films from the 2005 international festival circuit, Nobuhiro Suwa's UN COUPLE PARFAIT makes a brief but welcome return to Toronto, especially for this Limited Run. Suwa, one of Japan's most compelling contemporary filmmakers, has made his greatest film yet and, remarkably, in a language he barely speaks. A hybrid of sensibilities and cinematic traditions, UN COUPLE PARFAIT at first appears a typical French bourgeois domestic drama, but its precise, procession-like pace is inflected with distinct Japanese subtleties. Having lived in Portugal for a number of years, Marie and Nicolas return to France to attend their friend's wedding in Paris, while their own marriage secretly hangs by a thread. Their recent separation still new to them, they fumble through every exchange in public and private, unsure of each other and embarrassed and distraught at the prospect of the inevitable end of their fifteen-year relationship. To their friends, they have always been "a perfect couple." But can a perfect pairing exist? Ozon-favourite Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi (5x2, LE TEMPS QUI RESTE) is heart-wrenching as Marie, whose impossible expectations and existential dilemmas invariably lead to exasperation with her handsome husband, flawlessly portrayed by hunky Bruno Todeschini. Mostly improvised, the dialogue is disarmingly true to life - but it is the silence and suffocating tension suffused with loss that linger after the film has ended. Suwa's long takes (about thirty-five for the entire film) carry the weight of that silence, his camera still to the play of his actors, who are framed in tight, claustrophobic spaces to heighten the anxiety of their tragic predicament. Doors and low lighting are used stylistically but also metaphorically to convey the unforgiving fatalism that threatens to destroy something once thought to be so right. "UN COUPLE PARFAIT is a kind of collision between the visions of