INTIMACY – Film Review

Mark Rylance plays a bar manager in a smart Soho joint who has left his wife; Kerry Fox plays the struggling fringe-theatre actress who comes round once a week for pure carnal humping to the south London pad where a mate is letting him crash.  No strings, no responsibilities – precisely the sort of sexual freedom that matrimony had denied him.  The original meeting was supposed to be the first and last tango in Elephant and Castle, but Kerry keeps showing up every week at the same time for another one, and Rylance can’t – or won’t say no.  Inevitably, Rylance gets obsessed with this woman and starts following her when she leaves.  He has, as they say, grown accustomed to her face, and everything else.  This is when he meets her small son and Timothy Spall, her plump cabbie hubby.  A bizarre, edgy acquaintance develops between the two, in which neither Rylance nor the audience can decide whether Spall is complaisant or deluded, or whether Rylance is just cruising for an almighty bruising.

(The Guardian, 27^th July 2001).