”A film about love and blunders done from the perspective of age, crafted by writer Alan Ayckbourn, 68, and director Alain Resnais, 85. Our younger directors and screenwriters should show this much brilliance and feeling. ””
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

 “Resnais has always been an expressionist, using his settings and compositions to evoke the inner states of his characters. Here, tying expressionism to social critique, he becomes an improbable but unmistakable blood brother of Carl Dreyer.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Director Alain Resnais’s comments:
“What struck me first when I read Private Fears in Public Places was the characters’ constant determination to shake off their solitude, with all the obstacles that implies. The sense of solitude is irreversible. There’s no cure for the desire not to be alone. It’s the eternal quest for happiness. It’s easy to believe it’s within your grasp and hard to accept that it is a figment of your imagination.
With Private Fears in Public Places, I realized that I could take an opposite track compared to Smoking/No Smoking, [in which] I pushed attention to detail to fanatical extremes, by ensuring that all the props and costumes were as English as possible (…) This time, we were dealing with a typically London play, which offered the possibility of transposing it to Paris. It occurred to me that the equivalent of the new London setting was the rapidly expanding district around Bercy, the Avenue de France and the new National Library with its very singular light. Also, it’s a neighbourhood that fits in well with a modern-day story about real estate brokers and their clients. “