Intimacy
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - July 27, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. 120
minutes. Written and directed by Patrice Chereau. Starring Mark Rylance,
Kerry Fox, Timothy Spall, Alastair Galbraith.
Patrice Chereau's "Intimacy" starts
out strikingly, proceeds interestingly, and ends up a fragmented jumble,
following around the wrong character. I saw the movie at a critics' screening,
and asked a couple of the other folks there "What the hell was that second
half about?" Unfortunately they seemed to think I was making some sort of
ironic comment, instead of a sincere question; I got smiles rather than a
proper answer, and I'm still at a loss.
The film stars Mark Rylance as a lonely Londoner
who meets a woman at his house, every Wednesday at 10am, for sex and nothing
else. Hardly a word is said between them. They take off their clothes and
go at it. And then the woman (played by Kerry Fox) leaves, and no questions
are asked.
At first Rylance doesn't seem to recognise the
significance of this arrangement. And then in one key scene he decides to
follow his mystery woman after she leaves his house, and becomes obsessed
with finding out about her. His tawdry little arrangement might not be much,
but it's all he has. His former best friend is a junkie, and through flashbacks
we learn that his wife and kids are gone -- he needs something to live
for.
The entire first half of "Intimacy" is a solid
portrait of a despondent guy trying to connect with something. Rylance's
performance is strange, detached, poignant -- he looks like a shock victim
moving through the motions of life. The sex scenes hit the right note --
aesthetically unerotic, but kind of grubbily fascinating. And I was intrigued
by such things as the contrast between the intimacy of Rylance and Fox's
sex scenes and the cold, distanced, stalker-like quality of the moments where
he follows her.
The movie loses its way in its second half, becoming
a patchy exploration of Fox's acting career and her relationship with her
husband. Aside from this subplot's parallels to the break-up of Rylance's
marriage, which are explored fairly early on, this is all useless; it doesn't
amount to much as a portrayal of Fox's psyche, and it strays from the point
of the movie, which is Rylance.
"Intimacy" has already become notorious for its
hardcore sex scenes, and in featuring an unsimulated shot of oral sex, it
has taken full advantage of the new boundaries of the British Board of Film
Classification. There was a point in the movie where I felt certain it would
earn the right to rise above its publicity and become more important for
its quality, but ultimately, it blows it.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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