Intimacy

A divorced man (Mark Rylance) and married woman (Kerry Fox) meet every week for furtive sex on the floor of his pigsty flat; they barely speak and don’t even know each other’s names, but he—lonely or angry or both—begins stalking her to learn about her life. French director Patrice Chereau makes his English-language debut with this art-porn rehash of Last Tango in Paris, marked by a flailing, pseudo-verité camera and tortured dialogue that sounds exactly like badly translated French (between the twisted locutions, the London accents, and the spotty sound recording, the talk is often unintelligible). Rylance and Fox, fine actors, bravely grapple through some astonishingly convincing copulation (did they or didn’t they?), and even more bravely struggle with Chereau’s unspeakable lines.