Raw Desire and Trysts, but No Sign of a Tango


The melodrama "Intimacy," playing today at the New York Film Festival, is a one-of-a-kind, and some might say unholy, hybrid: "Last Tango in Paris" meets "Eastenders," the long-running, gray-skies British soap opera. Adapted from material by Hanif Kureishi, this London-set drama is sodden with misery.

Every Wednesday, the lovers Jay (Mark Rylance) and Claire (Kerry Fox) wordlessly go at each other, the only sounds being their grunts and sighs. Their sex isn't lyrical or lofty — there's a sad, feral neediness in their couplings. They tug off each other's clothes with a combination of rage and melancholy.

If "Intimacy" does anything well, it portrays desperation, in many different forms. The carnality lacks poetry. It's fleshy and clumsy, motivated by lust and shame. When Jay tries to find something better or deeper — intimacy — he loses. The movie's intelligence and courage in dealing with sex as nothing more than urges and draining it of eroticism is compelling. The movie has physical honesty, and reaches for emotional honesty, too.

The shame comes from Jay, a divorced father living in a hovel that would make a community-college bachelor pad look like an Architectural Digest layout. The walls are mottled, and his mattress is slumped in a heap in the middle of the room. He's the manager of a bar, a hard boss hectoring his employees.

Mr. Rylance has a small, gaunt face with a high forehead, a jawline that bears stubble even after he has shaved and a pencil-point chin that emphasizes the soapy somberness. With a scar dividing his left eyebrow, he has a shaken thoughtfulness and always looks distracted by something unpleasant. Because Jay is diverted by wanting to know more about Claire, he takes to following her after she leaves the Soviet-bloc décor of his flat, and once he penetrates her mystery, it leaves him only more anguished.

The working-class sobriety of "Intimacy" comes from Mr. Kureishi but is deepened by the director and co-scenarist, Patrice Chéreau, making his English-language debut. As in his French-language films, Mr. Chéreau invests a great deal of weight in his actors, and they respond with all they have.

"Intimacy" is incredibly physically demanding, and the explicit sex scenes will draw audiences. But the performances, particularly that of Ms. Fox, are quite good. Claire looks like another person when she's in the sunlight, and when she turns the tables on Jay's stalking attempt, she takes on even more coloring. At least in some parts of her life, she's capable of pleasure.

But the narrative loses power once we see Claire outside pursuing her real life. She's an actress, starring in a production of "The Glass Menagerie" staged in the basement of a pub. This tatty melancholy that comes from juxtaposing Tennessee Williams's florid treatise on need with the vacancy of Jay and Claire's separate lives is a little too obvious. And the "Tango" aspect of the sex, with the participants wracked with unhappiness, seems overly literary, too. If Jay and Claire lead unfulfilling lives separately, why would they turn to an affair to add to the burden?

Especially since it turns out that Claire is unhappily married. Jay meets her taxi-driver husband, Andy (Timothy Spall), whose brash, likableness is tinged with something else — he's a joy to watch and lends a beating heart to the picture.

Andy is a habitué of the pub where "Menagerie" is put together, and Jay subtly taunts the big man, letting the air out of this agreeable lump by slowly letting on about his affair. It's here that "Intimacy" gets at something: Jay's self-destructiveness. He's not actually capable of any emotional intimacy. He barks and growls at his squatter roommates, one of whom, Ian (Philippe Calvario), is a gay bartender who looks a little like Jay. As Ian comments on Jay's inability to find happiness, it's as if Jay were having an out-of-body experience.

The picture's ambitions are bold — Mr. Chéreau and his co-writer, Anne-Louise Trividic, want us to recognize that as long as Jay and Claire lack self-knowledge they'll continue to ruin the lives of those around them. When Jay starts talking to Claire's son, we cringe; someday, his sons and hers will have to deal with the emotional shrapnel left by their parents. Jay is a contagion of suffering and ultimately the heartfelt but overly elaborate "Intimacy" is a roiling ball of angst that spreads suffering too.

You'll be hard pressed to forget it, though.