Intimacy (2001)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Blistering performances.

First time I see these two actors, they've been in the theatre for very long, so their performances are top notch quality. The movie takes you to the land of unwelcome emotions and how they can ruin a relationship between two people, it happens everyday between friends, couples, lovers. Truth is sex can hurt without you realising. This movie is great at showing that, as you watch the intensely realistic sex scenes and then you see him alone waiting for her, you can feel his pain. I really liked the soundtrack it was upbeat and light. There are some drawbacks such as the actor playing husband is basically unrealistically ugly and dumb for the woman. It's got some really great scenes and definitely worth watching and it ends as it should end in real life. Very good.

A film more famous for the unsimulated sex on show than for any inherent artistic value. Naturally, the performances are very concentrated - the matter of the film (trying to have and eat the cake of a vast, exciting but impersonal London) and the sexual acts mean that everyone is very focused. I guess it also comes from working with an iconic director too.This is not to say that the performances are good. I like Rylance but I think he overplays his hand here. Conversely I don't think that Marianne Faithful brings anything to the film. Spall's cab driver is ill-served with the script leftovers. This leaves Kerry Fox to prop the film up and she creates quite a remarkable character actually, a temporal bohemian spirit in an article, middle-class body.What Chereau's film does achieve is, amazingly, a sense of urban romance, even in the bleak existential wastes of these people's lives. You have to wait for the very final shot, over which run the credits, to get the full measure of this. 3/10

One of the most unpleasant films I've ever seen.The dialogue is howlingly bad. All the characters are reprehensible. The script doesn't make any sense whatsoever.The only thing everyone talks about this film are the sex scenes because the rest is not worth mentioning. The story made so little sense. The relationships between the characters were unbelievable (the gay bartender, the drunk roommate, the main character befriending the overweight husband, etc). Everyone, and I mean everyone, was dour and angry.The bits of dialogue made me laugh out loud. Nothing rang true. Notice the hilarious dialogue during the scene between the two women in the park. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Here's an example:"When I died, there was no one there. I had to go through the whole thing on my own.""What was it, the day you died?"Who talks like that?To make things even worse, the acting is strictly amateurish.The film has a very French feel to it because the director is French but the whole thing didn't jibe at all. It was like watching British characters behave in a French manner, with everything set not in France but set in England.It's almost like the director wanted to make all English folks look bad. Really bad.Avoid at all cost.

I expected much more from "Intimacy." I remember when it first came out in 2001 and got a lot of bad reviews from the critics, but at first I thought it was probably just because they couldn't handle the (allegedly) "explicit" content matter. I was wrong: it really is a mediocre movie.The main problem is that we just don't care about the characters at all, I suppose. This could be compensated for by a strong director or interesting script, but it has neither. It's an independent film and the standards of film-making are simply just OK.Not all great low-budget films have likable characters but when you have one so ugly, it helps to make up for it by at least having characters we can relate to. (Good example: "The Panic in Needle Park." You feel like yelling at the characters, but you care for them because you can relate to their daily struggles -- lack of food, employment, money, etc. -- anyone who's been down on luck before can understand.) But "Intimacy" isn't the same. It's about a family guy who dumps his wife and kids and becomes a bartender at a London pub. He meets an anonymous woman for sex every week in a dirty apartment in a bad area.The movie doesn't work as an art-house experiment because it's neither artsy nor experimental. It pretends to be by showcasing those famous "lingering" shots that's become really tiring since every indie filmmaker decided it was a sign of talent and originality. It's not experimental because it follows the guidelines in terms of direction, cinematography and acting. It's not erotic because the sex scenes are dull and Kerry Fox is, to be totally honest, an ugly woman. (Which is the point - it makes the story more realistic - but all the same it also makes it un-erotic.) I think women would probably say the same about the male lead - and I hate to be the first person to point it out, but in regards to the infamous "real" sex scenes in the film... he's about as "big" as a blade of grass, and Kerry Fox is about as stimulating to watch as bumer-to-bumper traffic.It's not deep because it's so basic - we get to see the lack of morality in the leading characters. Well whoop-dee-do, so what? You're likely to find much better films out there than this. In terms of independent cinema it's a big let-down because it seems like any major Hollywood film hiding underneath the mold of something it isn't. The story isn't anything special and has been done before, the acting is just so-so, the "erotic imagery" isn't erotic, the level of entertainment is about zilch.All in all it comes across as a cheap imitator of "Last Tango in Paris," which is about a hundred times better and a much more prominent example of having unlikable characters in a movie that we can still feel a connection for.