INTIMACY- what kind of a furry animal is that?

Intimacy

- an european film

 

Criticized for its "pornographic eroticism", "Intimacy" by Patrice Chereau ( a film that won the Golden Bear in Berlin 2000) unveils the ugggggly of our every day life...

 

It is a realistic, hard and explicit film about our irresistible wish of always having more...

Claire and Jay are lovers, but they do not know each other intimately.

Their encounters are exclusively sexual and filmed so explicitly that they cannot become immoral. Or morbid. The failed actress and the bartender meet every Wednesday afternoon on the worn out carpet of a hideous apartment somewhere in the East End.

 Under the apparent perversion of their gestures there is the basic need of the two to survive.

They enter each other's body with the wish of entering their souls, even in this case when the bynom sex+love does not lead to Intimacy+LOVE...

 

What is love, admitting it exists?

Is there enough to have sexual intimacy, in order to  lure ourselves of having reached the real thing?

 One of these Wednesdays Claire doesn't show up.

It will be the trigger for Jay to depart in an exhausting chase for the woman's identity. A desperate attempt to win more space in her life.

 

The image is shaken, many times unclear, as a reflexion of the chaos the bartender lives in.

It alternates the camera on the shoulder and its claustrophobic consequences, with more conventional frames, which returns a sort of documentary and a tragic dimension to the movie.

As it recreates Jay's interior disturbance, the camera is also an echo to the brownien hazards of the outside world.

 Jay's living space seems more of a squat, impossible to manage.

There dominate terrible dirt and disorder, with nothing really personal: old clothes thrown among desuete cd-s, fallow interiors, a minimum of comfort, flooded toilets.

A typical house for an inconstant budget...

In contrast we see his bourgeoise family house, a typical London home: clean neighborhood, kitchen curtains and fluffy carpets, faience warm bathroom..

 The irony of the title is a reflection on the human condition of always wanting to belong to something or someone, despite the cruel reality of our existential isolation.

It thus forces us to meditate on a double interpretation of the concept of "intimacy".

 

Far from the edulcorated image of love in the Hollywood movies, "Intimacy" shines in its natural light, without being distorted by visual effects, choreographed scenes and perfect bodies.

Its graphic realism is an aggression for a public expecting the classical "romantic film".

 

"Intimacy" is human and attentive... a film about vulnerability, brittleness and susceptibility...

 

Giulia  Ghica Dobre