Intimacy (2001) - film review

Jay lives alone in a squalid London flat since walking out on his wife and children.  Cold and cynical, he appears to have no need for an emotional relationship.  He satisfies his need for physical love by having sex once a week with a woman who visits him without saying a word.  After a while, he becomes curious about the strange woman and decides to follow her when she leaves him.  The woman turns out to be an aspiring actress, Claire, who gives drama classes and works for a small theatre company.  Intrigued to find out more, Jay gets to know her husband, Andy, who is oblivious of his wife’s infidelity...

After such successes as La Reine Margot (1994) and Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train (1998), Patrice Chéreau achieved some notoriety (and indeed vilification) with Intimacy, his first English language film, which explores the darker side of human desire.  The film has the raw provocative edge of Chéreau’s earlier L’Homme blessé (1983), which also takes a pessimistic and disturbing view of human sexuality.  However, despite the daring shown in both its subject and its cinematic style, Intimacy is generally a disappointing work, failing to show either the conviction or artistic quality of Chéreau’s other works.

The crude way in which the film is shot and edited initially gives the drama a frisson of vérité, but the images are so ugly and  so relentlessly grim that the film’s sombre visual feel soon becomes more of an irritation than a selling point.  Add to that a set of totally unlikeable characters, whose negativity is constantly present but never explained, and the film manages to do just about all it can to alienate its audience.  The lead actors do what they can to make their characters believable but, when so little of their motivation or background is accounted for, their efforts are largely wasted.  The film’s ending appears more sentimental than moving, mainly because by this stage the characters Jay and Claire appear too implausible to be taken seriously.

The film is also weaked greatly by its excesses – the sex scenes are gratuitous and obscenely explicit, the dialogue outrageously O.T.T. in its use of expletives.   All this detracts from the film’s better points and merely reinforces the impression that it is a grotesque caricature of life, intended more to provoke than to inform.

© James Travers 2003

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