Parallel Worlds

Designing status projects for the newly wealthy while vaguely pursuing an affair, a successful but frustrated architect loses sight of his listless wife's depression until she is forced to take radical steps to repair her selfhood. There's no real surprise in the narrative premise of this Franco-Czech production, but its limpid mood, charged atmosphere of often unvoiced conflicts, and dream sequences of disquieting, symbolic authority (London conjured as desert; living houses and the like) ensure that it speaks truthfully about the emotional silences of modern life and relationships, despite an unpersuasive finish.