Intimacy

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

As bracingly explicit as Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris seemed in its day, this bleak and oddly old-fashioned film trails clouds of controversy its makers never sought but must have expected.

Most of the sensation has been devoted to the (short) screen time occupied by Mark Rylance's penis ("Never have so many column inches in print been devoted to a column's inches," the Evening Standard's critic Alexander Walker commented tartly) and the brief, unaffected scene in which Kerry Fox gets very up close and personal with it.

That attention probably says as much about the attitude of the English, and particularly the English press, to sex - a kind of salacious prudishness that revels in what it reviles.

Certainly Intimacy is notable for its intimacy but there's a profound and cheerless irony in the title. The on-screen relationships are conspicuously devoid of intimacy - though the explicit sex underlines that only when seen in the light of what follows - and, in anatomising his characters' thoroughly modern malaise, Chereau has made an engrossing, if scarcely uplifting, film.

The screenplay, by Chereau and Anne-Louise Trividic, is drawn from a novella and a short story by Hanif Kureishi (the source of such grungy modern urban classics as My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), one of which controversially fictionalised the collapse of the writer's own marriage.

But we're well into the film before we know even the names of the two people who meet weekly in a grotty south London basement for intense, wordless sex.

Chereau is at pains to deglamorise their couplings; there is none of the charitably lit and edited artifice of pornography and the camera observes almost offhandedly the lovers' lumps and blemishes. In this sense it is a contrasting companion piece to the (also ironically entitled) A Pornographic Affair, whose tantalising coyness is here replaced by a brutal explicitness. In that affair something approaching love was born of sex; in this, the sex never begins to fill the well of each character's despair.

But the drama quickens when the story moves out into the crowded, jangling streets and we begin to learn about Jay (Rylance, the artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe) and Claire (our own Fox).

He is the dazed exile from a broken marriage and she is in a partnership with a portly cabbie (Spall's blend of bonhomie and aggressiveness is chillingly Pinteresque). When he begins a clandestine invasion of her life, the film takes on the feel of a psychological thriller in which who knows what becomes deeply and threateningly ambiguous.

Intimacy is less than flawless: perhaps because it's penned by non-native speakers the screenplay lands some leaden lines in the mouths of its characters, and antipodean ears will notice the unmistakably Kiwi cadences of Fox's delivery when the arguments get heated.

But as a study of lives of silent desperation, it verges on the masterly and its main performances are authentic and unflinchingly courageous. It's no joyride, but it is an interesting and important film.

Cast: Kerry Fox, Mark Rylance, Timothy Spall

Director: Patrice Chereau

Rating: R18 (contains sex scenes and explicit sex scenes)

Running time: 120 mins

Screening: Rialto from Thursday.