Film Review of Intimacy
Year: 2001 Reviewer: Chris Docker
For art house movie lovers, easily one of the best movies so far this year. Already winner of notable awards at the Berlin Film Festival, including Best Actress, it could be set to offer Kerry Fox an Oscar nomination. In the French Cinema Verite tradition, the story looks at the ultimate bleakness of a purely sexual relationship where the two participants meet only for sex and know hardly anything about each other. From an initial kitchen sink drama level it opens out into a more colourful world where we see the two main characters in the context of their individual worlds. The characters feelings have, by this time, developed for each other, but without any knowledge or understanding of their respective lives. A scene involving an acting class seems to comment not only on how we can compartmentalise our lives in this way but raises questions about acting, in art and in real life, and also on the boundaries of intimacy and censorship. Intimacy pushes the censors boundaries in this film, as have a number of recent French films - the graphic inclusion of genitalia and oral sex being the issues here for British cinema, which have been passed uncut. The movie is neither titillating or gratuitous, so cuts, it could be argued, would have been morally abhorrent. The transformations Kerry Fox undergoes are emotionally powerful - I still felt shaken by the time I got home from the cinema.
Rating: 8/10
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