INTIMACY Patrice Chereau takes us so swiftly into a series of heated sexual trysts that Intimacy, with its highly explicit sex scenes, seems a bit more seamy than your average "serious" film. What seems like an attempt at soft-core porno hiding behind a veil of European art film intellectual pretentiousness turns out to be a raw, but carefully rendered, portrayal of humanity; our needs, our emotions, and finally, our inevitable attachments, whether we want them or not.

A man (Mark Rylance), opens a door of his house to a woman (Kerry Fox) one afternoon. We gather from their conversation that this isn¹t her first time in his place. After a particularly awkward silence, they proceed down to his basement where they rip their clothes off and literally fuck without a shred of tenderness or sentimentality. When they are done, she gets up, and without a word, puts on her clothes and leaves. The next week, a similar scene is repeated again. And once again the week after.

The freedom of sex with complete anonimity is soon destroyed as "the man," whom we come to know as Jay, develops a feeling for "the woman" and one day follows her across town. Jay learns that his silent lover is named Claire, and is an actress in a small production of "The Glass Menagerie" performing in the basement of a dingy bar outside of town. By coincidence, he also gets to know her husband, Andy (Timothy Spall), and her little boy. The sparks that flies with the anonymous sexual liasons cannot be revisited once they are weighed down by their concrete realities of their day-to-day lives.

Intimacy is blessed with several highly talented actors. Rylance and Fox (one of the three crazy roommates in Danny Boyle¹s "Shallow Grave") are superb. Spall portrays Claire¹s cab driver husband, who, with his unrefined look and coarse talk, is not all as shallow as he appears to be. Once again, Spall has his character nailed as he previously did in Mike Leigh¹s terrific "Secrets and Lies" where he stole the film with his portrayal of a miserable portrait photographer. His look, that of an English working class everyman, adds a profound impact with the surprise release of emotion when he shivers in tears behind his half-empty beer mug. Like a bonus track, the singer Marianne Faithfull portrays a friend of Claire¹s and is delightful.

Extremely raw, "Intimacy" gives us the reality of human pathos, crude and non-glossy, like the moles on the skin, the less than perfect bodies according to the airbrushed standard of Cosmopolitan magazine, and the cellulite on the actor¹s naked flesh. And unlike the Hollywood dreams where there are definite endings, things in the real world are more complicated and, often, unresolved.