Intimacy

Colour, 35 mm
France, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, 2001, 119 min
Section: Tribute to Patrice Chéreau

Synopsis

Every Wednesday a woman rings on the bell of a shabby London house. A man opens the door and, without a word, gesture or emotion, they go down into a basement filled with useful and superfluous junk to a room containing a mattress with sheets on it. The sex between them is fiercely passionate, yet strangely cold. They don’t even know each other’s names. Is this intimacy? For Jay (Mark Rylance), this is the only thing he is willing to do. Some time previously he left his wife and two children without explanation and now works as a barman, cool, taciturn, almost incapable of normal communication. What does he expect to gain from his "Wednesdays”? He only finds out when, one day, he breaks the unspoken rules and starts following his lover (Kerry Fox) to observe her in her "civilian” existence as an amateur actress named Claire and the mother of a little boy. This knowledge affects him to the extent that he tries to destroy her "idyll”. Why? This study of two unhappy, emotionally frustrated and unfulfilled people, based on the semi-autobiographical short stories by Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, The Mother), is the first film Patrice Chéreau made in English, in which he reflects on the true meaning of intimacy, readily incorporating explicit sex scenes in the first part of the story. However, he consistently rids them of any trace of romanticism or tenderness and merely uses the images for a raw study of emotional self-delusion. Intimacy won the Berlin IFF in 2001 and Kerry Fox also took away the Silver Bear for Best Actress.