Intimacy is a European co-production directed by French director Patrice Chereau in his first English speaking feature, also set in the UK. The script is based on two pieces by writer Hanif Kureishi: the book "Intimacy", and the short story "Nightime".Intimacy tells the story of Andy, a divorcée bartender who meets Claire at his apartment on Wednesday to have sex, no words involved... until they start to click emotionally and Andy starts following her to know more about her.Intimacy is a soaring and raw movie about mid life disenchantment, and the need of physical contact to built emotional one.The film has been controversial due to the presence of explicit sexual scenes. However, reducing such a good film and story, to just the sex scenes is intentionally misleading, moralistic, and completely unfair to a story that presents many of the problems of middle-agers in a honest and raw way: abandonment, divorce, loneliness, the feeling of being lost and emotional empty, the sense of not going anywhere in life, the trouble to fulfill your responsibilities as an adult despite being all messed up in your head and soul, fracas and rejection, unhappiness and hope. All of this is beautifully blended and portrayed in the film.The sex scenes are very strong, very demanding both physically and emotionally, simulated most of them, but very convincing as they really and feel very real. The viewer gets the impression that is watching a real couple having sex. The sex is always raw, and goes from almost brutal to sweet, from hungry to delightful, from anxious to comforting, with all the body language and emotions associated to different emotional states. Being so, the viewer does not feel aroused by the images, but sad and anxious about the couple being so needy of contact, and so unable to contact. The sex, in that sense, is a proof of the soul and feelings of the characters, not a dirty thing. In that regards, the film creates a clear line between what sex is not, and sets a clear boundary with porn, despite the fellatio in the film being non simulated, which is portrayed as a sweet moment of sharing and not a as woman mechanically sucking a man off for his own pleasure and as a sexual slave.The mood of the movie is great, with a mix of night and interior greenish/yellowish depressing scenes and warm and luminous ones. The art direction is great, as well as the music.The performances by all actors are terrific, convincing, powerful, and masterful, especially the leading couple Mark Rylance as Jay and Kerry Fox as Claire, in two roles that are extremely demanding both at a physical and emotional level. The supporting actors are also good and convincing: Alastair Galbraith as Claire's husband Victor, Philippe Calvario as the gay bartender Ian, Timothy Spall as Jay's drug addict brother Andy, and Marianne Faithful as Claire's friend Betty, among others. Although Galbraith is always terrific, I don't think he was the right person, physically, for his character, as it is difficult to believe that Claire would be with this sort of guy, to be honest.A very sad movie, not easy to watch, with confronting images and themes, moving at times, with a very powerful story, wonderfully performed and directed. Abstain from viewing if you are a puritan, as you will only see the sex.

Well I watched this film, and found myself fast forwarding thru the love scenes. They were too explicit, too visual, especial one particular part. It was unnecessary to show that much skin and certain oral acts. There are classier ways to show a love scene. This however felt like borderline porn.Well besides the major flaw mentioned above, this film could have been great. If done in the vein of "Match Point", it could have been a real gem. Terrific story, but clouded by a shoddy script and uninteresting characters. The flashbacks the gentlemen was having were sort of moving, and he did some fine acting. The woman as well, but I just feel with beautiful cinematography, a screenplay that concentrated more on the loneliness the two main characters go through than the graphic sex scenes this film could have been much better. Oh well.Please don't watch this.

A worthy movie for adults. The plot is a bit like "Last Tango in Paris," with a man and woman accidentally meeting, then showing up one afternoon a week for some rabid sex, neither telling the other anything about themselves. The guy (Mark Rylance) decides to follow the woman (Kerry Fox), discovers she's married and works in a shabby theater, and is married to a not-overly-bright man who has too many chins and a puffy lower lip like Alfred Hitchcock's. Both of the men want her and she decides to stay with her husband and children. End of plot.This is about as deglamorized a movie as has recently appeared. At first, both Rylance and Fox look like the kind of people who are right up there in the first rank of the third rate. He runs a bar. He's balding, skinny, always needs a shave, and lives alone in some seedy dump that looks like a Soviet-era zheloy dom. She first appears with her hair up, working-class style, glumly groomed. And the two of them are photographed -- dressed or otherwise -- in a way that makes their skin seem to emit a pale sickly blue. Your first thought is liable to be a red flag: This is going to be one depressing flick.Then as the plot develops -- hard as it is to follow in its details -- we come to know them surprisingly well, the two of them. Rylance takes on a certain pathetic charm with his scarred eyebrow and occasional stutter. And Kerry Fox lets her hair down, literally, and we can see the self-knowledge and the desire in her big blue New Zealand eyes. They become likable.In many ways the most admirable person important to the story is Timothy Spall as Kerry's husband, the Hitchcockian cab driver. He's not particularly bright and he trusts people a bit too much. And, man, he looks unprepossessing. But he's gregarious, generous, good-natured, and as harmless as a child. When he discovers that Rylance and Fox have been boffing each other, what does he do? Does he pick up a gun and spray lead. Does he do a plastic-surgery number on Rylance's face? Nope. He goes round to Rylance's bar, has a beer, and tells Rylance that he loves his wife. And that every day he loves her more. Later, when Fox prompts him to ventilate his anger over her affair, all he can come up with is something like, "I don't care about that s***! What really bothers me is that you're a lousy actress and will never be anything else!" When he's done shouting, she replies, "You don't even know how to hurt me." There are other characters in the story too -- children, an ex-wife, somebody named Victor with a Scots accent, and a gay French bartender who philosophizes a lot. (I wonder if the writers had a particular model in mind.) Next to Kerry's husband, the French guy is about the most articulate of the bunch.But that's the problem with the movie. I was frankly lost at times. I honestly don't know how Spall's character found out about his wife's affair. Evidently she confirmed suspicions he already had, but since the scene doesn't appear on screen we have to guess. In fact, if the love scenes are speechless, the rest of the script isn't much better. More than once a character says to another, "I can't understand a word you're saying." Sometimes I couldn't either. "We shouldn't be gay because someone died." "Nobody died." "I died once. It was the only day I could tell the whole truth." I think we're in "Last Year at Marienbad" territory here. A shouting match between Rylance and Kerry in the basement theater made no sense to me at all. It reminded me of my marriage.I recommend it though. It's a rare movie made for adults. It's a challenging drama about lives that are either half empty or half full, depending on how you look at them. The ending is sad, but we are at least left with the hope that these characters can mend their tattered lives and get on with things.

With it's premise of anonymous sex and emotionally distant characters this in some ways resembles a cross between "Last Tango in Paris" and the recent "Closer" but the manner in which the material is handled fails to come even remotely close to those superior films. Story is about Jay (Mark Rylance) who's a divorced father of two boys and now is head bartender in a popular English pub. Every Wednesday afternoon he meets Claire (Kerry Fox) and the two of them have sex but do not discuss with each other who the other person is.*****SPOILER ALERT***** Claire stops coming by on Wednesdays and Jay starts to follow her around and discovers that she's an amateur actress working in a play in the back of a pub. Jay enters the establishment and views the play and actually meets Claire's husband Andy (Timothy Spall) and starts a friendship with him but after a few visits it becomes apparent to Andy what is going on between them.Patrice Chereau is an actor/director/writer and has worked a good deal in the theater and there are several scenes that take place with the actors that appear could have fit well in a stage production. The story takes an angry approach to it's characters as their portrayed as people who just cannot commit completely emotionally and while as interesting as that is it's hard to feel one way or another for those involved. In "Closer" we don't feel remorse but we do understand (and feel) their pain and anger but here the story tries so hard for the viewer to know how distant these people are that it ultimately becomes impossible to have one feeling or another. Spliced into this film are some pretty good performances and while Rylance shows he can carry a picture it's the always reliable Fox that is easier to identify with. Arguably the best performance comes from Spall (Secrets and Lies) who shows us a character that has good instincts but after all the years of marriage finds out that his wife is terribly unhappy. Chereau presents us with characters that had real potential but the script fails in terms of allowing the viewer to be interested in their struggles.