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From a psychoanalytic vantage point, some of the main features of films dealing with the representation of intimate relationships can be schematically subsumed under three categories.
The first category concerns the exploration of the psychodynamic characteristics and unconscious meanings of that fine boundary which separates physical desire from emotional involvement - or, to put it more prosaically, sex from love. In particular, romantic films can be differentiated from erotic ones in that sexuality, while constantly present, remains implicit in the former and explicit in the latter. What, on the other hand, differentiates erotic films from pornographic ones is more difficult to define - other than in the most general and subjective terms of what, in a particular place and time, may be considered to be in ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’ taste, or aesthetically pleasant as opposed to morally offensive.
The second category emphasizes the significance of the universal recurring of triangular, that is oedipal, constellations. Any intimate relationship between two individuals represents the enactment of powerful unconscious fantasies which include the implicit, if not at times also explicit, ‘third’ who is excluded from it. This is what makes such relationships, and their filmic representations, so exciting at times, at other times so painful, and almost always enormously complicated. Otto Kernberg points out in this connection that we can have direct and reverse triangulations; in direct triangulation the unconscious fantasy involves “an excluded third party, an idealized member of the subject's gender - the dreaded rival replicating the oedipal rival”. Every man and every woman, Kernberg goes on to say: “fears the presence of somebody who would be more satisfactory to his or her […] partner; this third party is the origin of emotional insecurity in sexual intimacy”. Reverse triangulation, on the other hand, “defines the compensating, revengeful fantasy of involvement with a