Intimacy, Patrice Chereau 119 mins, (18)

Dodgy sex goes the way of all flesh

Internal links

Read Anthony Quinn's review

Intimacy has achieved the status of "most controversial film of the year" ­ so the poster blurb has it ­ largely because its lead actress at one point puts a penis in her mouth (possibly the lead actor's, though the editing makes it hard to be sure). That's not a professional porn actress, either, routinely tickling the viewer's libido, but a straight dramatic performer taking exceptional steps to boost a film's emotional intensity, and more than that, its reality factor. Patrice Chéreau's film, with its unusually harsh, prosaic sex scenes, touches on the oldest philosophical paradox of the acting profession: is a dramatic act also necessarily a real act? Or: does an actress playing a woman with a penis in her mouth really have a penis in her mouth?

Another question is why a mouthful of flesh should have become the ne plus ultra of cinematic reality ­ why it should signify the ineffably authentic more than, say, the tears later shed by the film's leads, Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance. It's surely harder physically, if perhaps easier emotionally, for a performer to gush salt water than to fellate a co-star ­ yet no-one thinks of screen or stage tears as anything other than part of a skilled performer's repertoire of emotional technology.

Despite its ostensible subject, Intimacy ­ adapted by Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic from a novel and a short story by Hanif Kureishi ­ is less about sex than about the thorny subject of the real, and real emotion, especially in relation to acting. Jay (Rylance) has left his wife and children, and lives in squalor in a south London house, where every week he has brusque, wordless sex with Claire (Fox), a complete stranger. One day he follows her to a pub theatre where she's acting in Tennessee Williams. Striking up acquaintance with her indefatigably chipper husband Andy (Timothy Spall), Jay begins to taunt him with vicious hints about what's really happening. "Take my wife," says Andy, and you expect Jay to reply, "Cheers mate, I already have." The most dramatically pregnant intimacy in the film is between the two men; if only Chéreau had approached their scenes with a cooler ironic distance, instead of twisting the knife so heavy-handedly.

Parts of Intimacy are quite extraordinary. The tryst scenes manage to depict real people ­ fleshy, pallid, with anything but conventional film-star bodies ­ having sweaty, desperate sex, not making love but unequivocally shagging, in a drear blue midweek-afternoon light. Eric Gautier's photography makes abstract compositions of the couple, turning them into sleek headless sculpture, but more often emphasises the rawness of their flushed skin, or highlights the trace of a candlewick bedspread on Fox's back.

Chéreau's London is similarly unvarnished, in a way that only foreign directors seem to achieve ­ a succession of drab, flattened vistas, with early-morning Battersea Bridge shot like the approach to hell. The widescreen also heightens the cramped interiors, making Intimacy seem all the more a horror story, a warning to married men who risk losing everything for a life of peeling Artex walls and mismatched coffee mugs.

It may be visually impressive, but Intimacy is a catastrophe to hear. The script is excessively talky, but the characters don't just talk. They rail and rant and squabble, at the slightest excuse and at a hyper-demonstrative pitch that is an established convention in French psychological realism, but one that seems alien to British acting styles outside TV soap. The film is excruciating when it directly addresses acting and its agonies. In a horrific drama-class sequence, Claire's pupils perform a narcissistic improv routine, the hand-held camera prowling for a glimpse of ineffable emotional truth. Chéreau seems forever to be pursuing that elusive, mythical moment where performance breaks down into some sort of unadulterated psychic discharge ­ just as the poisoned king suddenly sweated blood in his costume drama La Reine Margot.

But this febrile approach feels awkwardly excessive and sometimes downright farcical. Pushing his actors in the direction of non-naturalist expressionism, Chéreau gets some very weird performances. Spall stays on an even keel of unshakeable bluffness, until he too gets his turn to rant and rage. Marianne Faithfull is fruitily implausible as Claire's cockney confidante, a sort of demi-monde Dot Cotton. As the testy, self-absorbed, wholly unlikeable Jay, Rylance comes across best by far, with his strange, nervous cadences and his frazzled Egon Schiele gauntness.

Kerry Fox, though, loses out because Claire is less a character, more an enigmatic bundle of trauma that causes the men's rages to explode on contact. The only time Claire seems properly present is in the sex scenes ­ which may be the nub of Chéreau's dramatic argument, but an onerous challenge for any performer. Without a doubt, Fox gives an intrepid, defences-down performance, as indeed does Rylance; whether it properly fleshes out into a character is more doubtful.

For all its pursuit of realness, Intimacy feels entirely artificial and dreamlike. In a very French way, Chéreau is entertaining a late-Seventies fantasy of London as le capital du rock'n'roll lifestyle ­ a world of infernal squat parties, after-hours madness and eternal five-o'-clock shadow. But take away the drugs, drinking dens and rumbling doom-rock (Bowie, Iggy, Tindersticks), and this story could be your average Eng. Lit. sex triangle, a Hampstead novel of middle-aged angst with added nostalgie de la boue.

j.romney@independent.co.uk