Intimacy [IMPORT]

Rating:
Summary: When the center doesn't hold
Review: This amazing movie is a look at the ways that a man, the protagonist Jay (Mark Rylance) once-married, and a once fairly conventional husband and dad, can utterly fall apart in divorce, the heartbreaking ways he might try to put a life back together, and the ache for connection and communion that can't necessarily be soothed - within or without "happy" marriages.

By now the plot and the fact of its depiction of acts of sexual intercourse are well-known. There is a woman, Claire. She shows up at Jay's door, Wednesdays at 2 PM. We don't know anything about her at first - just that once she's in his apartment, her clothes (and his) come off. The five to ten minutes of intense once-weekly sex on Jay's apartment floor is no less important for being quick and wordless; it is a sort of a pact between the couple, and their shared illness, really. But it can't, ultimately, do the trick, and the film succeeds - unmoralistically - in showing us how and why. The urge to find either oblivion or ecstasy - whether via alcohol or sex or other means - fuels the couple. There are amazing surprises along the way, via a script that is utterly believable and natural.

In fact, every aspect of the protagonist Jay's life is in fact shown harshly, "graphically," whether it is his hectic job tending bar, his messy, depressing apartment (further evidence that he has lost his moorings), his several friends, or his frantic travels through London. (The camera chases him, and he is chasing her). We're by turns frustrated, confused, and focused. One's attention never wanders during this story.

Children (Jay's and Claire's) are used well in this film. They can tell the truth, and they do. They use the word "love" - and the adults in this movie really can't. In several scenes Jay is at his ex-wife's apartment, bathing his beautiful little sons. He lies on what was the marriage bed and makes a sort of sad and frantic fetish of his ex-wife's underwear, and is interrupted by his son, who needs his help. We are never asked to be voyeurs, but witnesses to a lot of sadness, distress - and the difficulty, really, of the attainment of happiness.

This is an astonishing film about broken hearts - and what people might do to try to mend them.

Rating:
Summary: I love you on wednesday, but not on thursday-E.S.V.Millay
Review: When I went to see that movie, I was a bit afraid of the sex scenes talked about in all media after this film had been awarded two Golden Bears, the highest awards of Berlin film festival (I prefer to watch films that got awards)...
What I then saw were two white bodies, moving together like Rodin's sculptures beautifully united in their dance of desire...There was no artificial smiles or styled muscles, natural true sex with sweating and sounds of exercise, and the relief afterwards, tenderness, not many words were exchanged ...
It was a film tremendously moving for the truth it showed, starting with the sex on the floor, pictures of the protagonist Jay smoking on the toilet in a bathroom filled with fungi (men usually do not clean up, that is so real)..
Reality without cosmetic everywhere: the brown, grey blocks of London suburbs, Jay's friend Victor, a sweating alcoholic wearing a moist but elegant jacket, wonderfully realistically played, too, Claire, in contrast to her type wearing once elegant black much too expensive underwear, which highlighted the image of her being a bad actress..(she played that role wonderfully, showing how good she really is..)..
Mark Rylance was superb in showing so much vulnerability, having had to leave the family, the boys he very much loved, the wife he still waited to show him something more than just detest(there is a rather naturalistic masturbation scene, after his wife had turned away from him in bed sleeping like their dead relationship..)...So much following, a great playing Marianne Faithful, Timothy Spall wonderful, all these naturalistic characters at the Pub or at the actors school...
I can watch that film on and on and still discover new things all the time....Wished that everybody could get so much from it!