synopsis:

Every Wednesday afternoon in a dingy London basement flat, Jay and Claire have no-strings-attached sex. There is a rawness in their couplings — a desperation that seems to be a mix of suffering, desire, and voracious appetite. Their bodies convey all that needs to be expressed. Words are few and far between. When Claire is ready to go, she dresses and leaves.

Jay, a forty year old who has left behind his middle-class marriage and two children in a fit of middle-aged angst, wants something more from Claire than arousal. So this barman breaks their sexual contract and follows her to a pub where he eventually meets her husband Andy, a taxi driver. Claire has a child and is playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie in the pub's dinky theatre. For her the sex with Jay is all part of her erotic need to improvise, to express herself in as many ways as possible, to connect. When Claire discovers that Jay has spied upon her, she feels violated.

Although both Jay and Claire are satisfied and gratified with their early sexual passion, in the end they do not find in it the kind of enlightenment or fulfillment they are looking for. Of the two of them, there is hope that Claire will use what she has experienced to further her erotic expression in other arenas. jay, on the other side, is confronted more and more with his empty and meaningless life.about this movie:'Intimacy', starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Timothy Spallis, Marianne Faithful and Philippe Calvario, is based on works by Hanif Kureishi – the novella 'Intimacy' and short story 'Night Light' – the former seen as a controversial justification by Kureishi for abandoning his own marriage for the sake of art. This unusual film dares to explore both the pleasures and the limitations of sexuality. As Jay's conversations with Andy and with Ian, a gay barman, reveal, he wants to be in control in his relationships with women. his performance haunts the viewer as epitomysing the lost soul of fortyish males, who want their youth, think they want sex and freedom, that rare connection with a woman that has meaning.

The sex scenes in this movie are explicit but totally non pornographic; they are painful, needy, unsatisfying except on an orgasmic level.