Intimacy

An uncomfortable film about a deeply alienated man whose only pleasure in life is his weekly, anonymous sexual encounter with a woman who may or may not be married to someone else. Reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Conversation, both in its characterizations and in the washed out color photography, Intimacy is largely successful in evoking the hollowness of the characters’ lives, but is somewhat slow at times and occasionally dips into bathos. On the plus side, it’s adopted the European cinema mode du jour of featuring actual hardcore sex. These scenes aren’t exactly erotic, but they are well thought out, in that they accentuate the mixed emotions of the protagonists, with each caress and withdrawal dripping with meaning and anxiety. Intimacy, in fact, may be the only film that successfully conveys something besides prurience through its sex scenes, and that alone could make it worth watching.