In reviewing the collection of short fiction by Hanif Kureishi, Midnight All Day Long, I wrote that "Kureishi is very good at the London-at-the-turn-of-the-(Christian) millennium bittersweet comedy of male menopause and the attendant breakup of marriages (common-law and contracted ones) and at expressing the sort of narcissistic anguish ("Is that all? It can't be!") of which John Cheever used to be the suburban American master." Most of the male protagonists in the stories collected in Midnight All Day have ended relationships in ways leaving their female former partners bitter.

Kureishi's short novel Intimacy is an interior monologue on the night before the man is going to walk out on wife and kids. That is, the bitterness engendered by the fleeing husband/father is imminent. Like the book, the 2001 screen adaptation) centers on adultery, but is very unpornographic: unarousing, and inexplicit. Although the Wednesday afternoon shaggers have at it (with a condom), they are mostly shown postcoitally embraced and disentangling limbs. The lovers are decorously photographed to avoid showing genitals or even pubic hair. Then the man who has left his wife and two young children wants to metamorphose weekly wordless screwing into love, and spends most of the second half of the movie blabbing.

Jay (Mark Rylance) ineptly follows Claire (Kerry Fox) and then, we he loses sight of her, she follows him until she realizes he has been following her. After that, Jay who has been nearly catatonic, except with his children, can't seem to shut up.

If I didn't know that Patrice Chéreau was/is a set decorator, I'd have never guessed it from the messy, ugly, mostly green set designs, photographed mercilessly by Eric Gautier. "Intimacy" is considerably more interesting than Chereau's earlier directorial forays I've seen, "L'homme blessé" (The wounded man) and "Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train " (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train" -- though that is anemically faint praise!). The very bloody "Queen Margot" is, for my money, the best Chéreau movie. to date.

"Intimacy" includes the great Marianne Faithfull as Claire's better-grounded friend, Betty (somewhat in the way Catherine Deneuve is in contrast to Bjö in (the even more searing) "Dancer in the Dark"). Herein, Faithfull is wiser and is far less raw than the lovers: Jay who is not good at promiscuity and Claire who is. Also notable in the fine cast is Alistair Galbraith as f__kup Victor.


Recommended:
Yes