Intimacy (2001 film)

Intimacy is a 2001 erotic drama film directed by Patrice Chéreau from a screenplay he co-wrote with Anne-Louise Trividic, based on stories by Hanif Kureishi (who also wrote a novel of the same title). It stars Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance. The film is an international co-production between France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, featuring a soundtrack of pop songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Intimacy contains an unsimulated fellatio scene by Fox on Rylance. A French-dubbed version features voice actors Jean-Hugues Anglade and Nathalie Richard.

The film has been associated with the New French Extremity.

Plot
Jay is a bartender who abandoned his family because his wife lost interest in him and their relationship. Now living alone in a decrepit house, he has intense weekly sex with a woman whose name he does not know. At first, their relationship is purely physical, but he develops an emotional attachment to her.

Wanting to know more about her, Jay follows her across the streets of London to the grey suburbs where she lives. He then follows her to a pub theatre where she is working as an actress in the evenings. Jay learns that her name is Claire, and she has a husband and a son. Subsequently, she makes it clear to Jay that she will not leave her family, and won't see him anymore.

Cast

 * Kerry Fox as Claire
 * Mark Rylance as Jay
 * Susannah Harker as Susan, Jay's wife
 * Alastair Galbraith as Victor
 * Philippe Calvario as Ian
 * Timothy Spall as Andy, Claire's husband
 * Marianne Faithfull as Betty
 * Fraser Ayres as Dave
 * Michael Fitzgerald as bar owner
 * Robert Addie as bar owner
 * Rebecca Palmer as Pam, girl in squat

Reception
Intimacy was placed at 91 on Slant Magazine's best films of the 2000s.

In a 2001 lengthy column for The Guardian, Alexander Linklater described the jealousy he experienced when his partner Kerry Fox took the real-sex role in this movie. Linklater concludes that he accepted the unsimulated oral scene, but he insists that the sexual intercourse is an illusion. Nevertheless, critics have declared its realist tendencies. Linda Williams, for instance, writes that "Intimacy opens with urgent, hurried and explicit penetrative sex" and Tanya Krzywinska writes that in this first scene "the spectator is left in little doubt that penetration has occurred".

In a 2015 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mark Rylance spoke of his experience on the film. At the time of the film's release, talk of the film's unsimulated sex scenes in tabloids added stress on his marriage. Rylance commented, "It soured me on my life two months. It’s my mistake, but I felt Patrice [Chéreau] put undue pressure on me on set to do that. And at that point I didn’t have the confidence as a film actor to say no. Now I think a lot of actors that people say are difficult are actually just being sensible.”

Awards
Intimacy won the Golden Bear for Best Film and the Silver Bear for Best Actress (Kerry Fox) at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001.