Intimacy (Intimité)
Directed by Patrice Chéreau.
Starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Timothy Spall.
Claire (Fox) comes to Jay’s (Rylance) apartment every Wednesday for wild but uninvolved sex. She leaves immediately afterwards; they barely speak. While repeatedly denying that he is really interested, Jay becomes increasingly obsessed with her. He follows her to an amateur theatre where he meets her bluff taxi-driver husband Andy (Spall). Every step of Jay’s involvement increases his turmoil and potential for self-destruction that threatens to destroy Claire and Andy as well.
The film is based on short stories by Hanif Kureishi, also responsible for My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. It joins a number of recent French films, including, I imagine, Romance (which wasn’t) and L’Ennui (which was), as tales of dehumanisation, boredom and passivity. The characters exist in social vacuums, lacking the psychological and emotional tools for meaningful existence. Psychological incapacity becomes social fact, and the only form of engagement with the rest of the world that they can think of is to wallow in the hedonistic nihilism of super-explicit sex. There’s a lot of this and it’s rather off-putting and tiresome. American Psycho showed that there’s more to meaninglessness: Patrick Bateman skipped a lot and talked about music (what about film?). However, though Intimacy’s depressing, harrowing and occasionally tedious and pretentious, it isn’t actually a bad film. The characters’ torment is not implausible and their fate does become involving. There are also unexpected touches of quiet humour that relieve the bleakness of it.
Genuine urban myth including off-colour humour and embarrassment to real individuals!!
This was told to me by Craig who is teaching English in Japan. He heard it from the horse’s mouth. That’s only two degrees of separation, which, oral historians will tell you, is acceptable for the preservation of accuracy. What follows is a paraphrase of the original message. You will notice that I have suppressed the name of the woman involved.
One of these English teaching schools in Japan has a rather primitive ‘long drop’ toilet. The teacher was running late for her class but had to attend to an urgent call of nature. She ran to the toilet, pulled down her pants and sat down all in the one motion. Then she heard a distant ‘plop’ which surprised her because there had been no muscle action on her part. Don’t keep your mobile phone in your hip pocket.
She had a hell of time trying to explain to the phone company what happened. “What? You’ve lost your phone?” “Well, not exactly, but it’s in a place that I can’t get to.” “But if you know where it is, you should return it... Where is it, exactly?” And of course she had to tell the story over and over again when she was giving out her new number to everyone. She’s a district leader, so that’s a lot of people.
One of the little girls in her classes was terrified of the long drop, so the teacher had to help her if she needed to go to the toilet. So, as the teacher was helping her, she had the embarrassment of hearing the mobile phone ringing out of the depths and having to explain why. During other classes that day, the kids would interrupt the lesson: the toilet is ringing again, sensei. It took several days for the batteries to run completely flat.
The ring tone is a particular song by Men at Work: “I come from the land down under”.
Guy
