6. Intimacy (2001)
Jay is a bartender with a failed marriage behind him. One a week he meets with an anonymous woman (shades of Last Tango in Paris?) to have sex. He falls in love with her so he follows her across suburban London and finds out she is an actress called Claire and she has a husband and son. She makes it clear to Jay that she will not leave her family and they have sex for the final time - achieving the intimacy that was previously lacking in their encounters. An interesting story about love and the lack of it, Intimacy benefits from some really good acting - Kerry Fox, Timothy Spall and Mark Rylance - but why director Patrick Chereau felt the need to put in unsimulated sex, I do not know. The film would have been just as compelling with simulated sex in place of hardcore inserts. I think the film came at a time when it was de rigeur to have ultra explicit sex scenes in French cinema. It came after the taboo busting Romance and Baise Moi and a lot of directors thought they could use hardcore sex to express some important themes in their movie. Unfortunately, sometimes the sex overshadowed the themes. Intimacy is a very compelling film due to the acting and the dynamics of the cast, not because of the sex scenes and the initial thrill of seeing an erect penis. The graphic sex is not needed here.