If it is not just a one-off casual encounter, but an ongoing engagement, will a point not arrive when they want to apprehend each other more fully than as merely sexual beings?
It is an interesting question, and one no less worth asking in 2001 than it was in 1972. It is not the only question Intimacy asks, however, and it is the kind of film that bravely asks questions to which it will not provide simple answers, if it provides any at all.
We do not know why Jay (Mark Rylance) has left his wife, or how he and Claire (Kerry Fox) began their series of Wednesday sessions in his dingy London flat. We are simply chucked in the deep end, into graphically explicit sex scenes between them. At least, unlike Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris, they know each other’s names. They don’t know much else, though.
But the situation is not sustainable: Jay starts following Claire through the streets, trying to discover more about her and her life, which he does, to ambiguous ends. At first I thought the film should have been made entirely from his perspective, which dominates its first half, but in hindsight it does seem appropriate that later on it opens out as he learns more about her and we begin to see into her life as well, a life that includes acting classes and a friendship with a distinctly dotty older woman (Marianne Faithful, in a strange and compelling cameo).
Many will find Intimacy uncomfortable. For one thing, the sex is not pretty. But then sex is not always pretty, not always a matter of burnished Hollywood bodies sliding between carefully placed sheets. And why should it be? The simple honesty of the way Chéreau presents the sex between Jay and Claire is moving rather than exciting. He eschews prettiness in both the sex scenes and those that take place in the rainy streets of the less glamorous parts of London, but from both he draws a new kind of beauty.
To give one simple example. In one scene, after they have had sex, Fox rolls over on to her side, and we see imprinted on her shoulders the cross-hatched pattern of the blanket on which she has been lying, a kind of brand impressed on her by the urgency of their lovemaking. A serendipitous detail, perhaps, and one that has no real narrative import, yet somehow it alludes to a whole realm of human frailty, to our messy, uneasy yet sometimes transcendent fleshiness.
This is the opposite of pornography, which has more in common with Hollywood’s contrived fantasies. Intimacy refuses the closure of either the climactic orgasm shot or the neat tying up of loose ends. Like life, it is all loose ends.