Julie Styron (Stockard Channing) has all the qualities you would expect from a highflying businesswoman - she's curt, dismissive and ruthless. She's also divorced, paranoid about her precarious position at the top and her closest friend is her secretary. So, in the cut-throat world of software sales, she naturally assumes that the meeting with the boss is a sign of her imminent dismissal. When she is suddenly promoted, Julie finds herself alone in an airport lounge with no one to share the good news with. Well, apart from her secretary.
Paula Murphy (Julia Stiles), meanwhile, is a happy-go-lucky maverick with aspirations to be a writer. This probably explains her blase attitude to the tech job she has at Julie's company, and why she arrived 45 minutes late to crucial meeting. The two women meet under these strained circumstances and, in a fit of rage, Julie fires Paula on the spot. When they cross paths in the airport bar later that day, Julie attempts to defrost the tension with some wicked strength whiskey. Their blossoming female solidarity becomes greater with the arrival of oily corporate headhunter, Nick (Frederick Weller), who, in an environment of oestrogen-fuelled fury, becomes the male scapegoat the women have been looking for.
With this 'men-are-shits' attitude amid a dissection of the high-powered business world, it might seem that The Business of Strangers is like a gender reversal of Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men (1998). A closer look reveals something less ferocious, more humane, but still maliciously funny.
A few darkly comic pranks - discussion of a strap-on dildo in a crowded lift, luring Nick in to their hotel suite under the false suggestion of a threesome - show Julie to be a professional rebel, who resents the trappings of managerial success. However, this newfound freedom leads to a night of painful revelation that plays like an up-market Pam Grier revenge melodrama. It's the quality of the first half of the film that makes the latter a tad trite, but the accretion of male resentment has to go somewhere.
The main focus of The Business of Strangers should be the conflict between Julie and Paula. The younger woman has no inhibitions about berating Julie on her lifestyle ("Your best friend's your secretary? That's pathetic.") but writer-director Patrick Stettner obviously felt the need to increase the plot's tempo - a device that makes it seem a bit contrived. Still, Channing and Stiles spar off one another in this battle of wills like prize fighters, which makes for a fascinating dynamic between two smart, hard-edged women, spurred on by a constant desire for one-upmanship.
Reviewed by Paul Clarke
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