Stimulation is the real issue of 'Intimacy' | Festivals & Awards
"Why not?" I said. "The American public spends billions of dollars on pornography, and the sex scenes here are not pornographic." Yet they do involve full frontal nudity. So the movie will be released either unrated or with the dreaded NC-17, and will not play in most U.S. cities or states, for that matter.
The whole matter will be interpreted in terms of the movie's sexual content. And yet here is the crucial point; will anything useful be said about the style, approach, purpose and message of the sex?
"Intimacy," a film in English by a French director, stars Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox as a man and woman in their late 30s who meet for anonymous sex on Wednesdays. Eventually, he grows curious about her, follows her and discovers that she is an actress with a husband (Timothy Spall) and young son. She teaches drama classes and is appearing in "The Glass Menagerie" in a small London pub venue (the door from the main bar helpfully says, "Toilets and Theater").
This is not a review, and so I won't go into detail about the plot. I want to talk about the sex. My inspiration is a talk I had with Kristina Nordstrom, who runs the Women Filmmakers Symposium in Los Angeles. We found ourselves eating sandwiches on the steps of the Eccles Center between screenings.
"Of course no woman would be attracted to sex like that," she said.
"Why not?"
"The sex in the movie all involves the bottom of the ninth inning. A woman would be turned off by a man who doesn't spend time being tender and sweet, and showing that he cares for her. There's no foreplay. She walks in, they rip off each other's clothes, and a few seconds later, they're in a frenzy. Any woman would know that this movie was directed by a man."
I knew after seeing "Intimacy" that I had problems with it, including the way the lover approaches the husband and the way the husband reacts. I also had admiration for it, especially the non-sexual aspects of the performances by Rylance (from "Angels and Insects") and Fox (from "Shallow Grave"). The movie is based on stories by Hanif Kureishi, a London writer.
