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In Chereau's Intimacy, sex breeds obsession and isolation
Patrice Chereau's controversial film, Intimacy, begins with thirty-five minutes of graphic sex. Claire (brilliantly played by Kerry Fox) arrives uninvited on her free Wednesday afternoon, knocks, and enters a squalid house flat belonging to Jay (Mark Rylance). Puzzled, he asks, “Was this agreed?” Apparently not, but without another word they proceed to have sex, at her initiative, on the floor. Their frenzied passion is repeated on subsequent Wednesday afternoons until Jay makes the mistake of trying to find out who Claire really is. And then the spell is broken.
People who expected erotica were disappointed. Roger Ebert, the dean of popular film criticism, describes the opening as “short, brutal, anonymous sex.” Ebert describes his own distaste and reports the dismissive judgment of Kristine Nordstrom, director of the Women Film Makers' Symposium of Los Angeles: “No woman would be attracted to sex like that,” she opined. Nordstrom's premise is that the typical male director projects his “slam bam thank you ma'am” sexual fantasies onto the screen, where a woman's desires are presented as a gratifying mirror image of what men want. In Intimacy, “[Claire] walks in, they rip off each other's clothes and a few seconds later they're in a frenzy.” Nordstrom concluded that “[a]ny woman would know that this movie was directed by a man.”
Although I think this version of feminist criticism misses everything interesting and important about Intimacy, Ebert and Nordstrom's reaction to the opening scene was typical. Watching a man and woman who are determined to give and get everything they can out of the sexual encounter did not turn on most critics. And not for want of realism: the two actors — he