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Being both hopelessly single as well as a film critic, there are a couple of things I often wish for the heavens to grant me. One is a screeching halt to the career of Martin Lawrence, and the other is an attractive woman who will show up on my doorstep and let me have my way with her once a week (or even every other week - I'm not too picky). In Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy, that's just the far-fetched situation in which the male lead finds himself (the girl part, not the Martin Lawrence part), and, in true cinematic fashion, he blows it by looking the gift horse square in the mouth.
The guy is Jay (Mark Rylance), the overbearing manager of a trendy London pub who has recently separated from his wife and two young sons. When Intimacy begins, Jay opens the door of his filthy, barren flat for Claire (Kerry Fox). Two minutes and about six words later, you're looking at Jay's engorged love rocket. Two minutes after that, if you watch really closely, you'll get to see Claire reveal that disappointed look I'm so used to seeing before she scrambles to put her clothes back on. And before you can unslack your jaw from what you've just witnessed, she's gone.
When the same thing happens a few minutes later (although a week of screen time has passed), the pair again fail to exchange any words before going at each other like angry wolves. It isn't until then that Intimacy really launches into its proper story, which finds Jay following Claire back home in his curiosity to find out what she's all about (after all, he doesn't even know her name). When he tracks her down to a tiny theatre in the basement of a pub (the helpful sign on the door reads "Toilets and theatre"), Jay learns Claire has the female lead in a Tennessee Williams play, but, more surprisingly, that she's married and has a young son.
Jay has trouble wrapping his mind around this discovery, as he assumed Claire was miserably single like himself. He strikes up a friendship with her husband (Topsy-Turvy's Timothy Spall), and you just know things are going to end badly. There's not much of a story here, and like the similarly titled Romance (which showed about as much romance as Intimacy featured intimacy), it's all about the graphically portrayed sex. The one scene that everyone will be talking about afterwards shows Fox performing fellatio on Rylance. As in for real. Having never been done before in a legitimate film, it is a pretty big deal (and no doubt helped Fox win the Silver Bear for best actress at last year's Berlin Fest, where the film itself took home the top award), but an authentic blow job doth not a good film necessarily make.
The sex scenes are quite well done, especially when you contrast them with the silky smooth softcore porn of Unfaithful. There's no romantic music here, or artistic lighting, or makeup to camouflage the unsightly imperfections on either actor. It's a frighteningly realistic look at completely passionless sex, and Fox and Rylance both do a good job of making us uncomfortable as we watch. Reminiscent of Last Tango in Paris (which was Bernardo Bertolucci's English language debut, much like Intimacy is Chéreau's), it's based on stories written by Hanif Kureishi, the Oscar-nominated writer of My Beautiful Laundrette.
1:59 - Not rated
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