Disclosing and Disrobing

Intimate revelation can often prove more complex than a straightforward love-story. Tony McKibbin looks back on some notable films which offer an intimate perspective on their characters' lives.

'Intimacy' is a word that's not too easy to define, but can we say it often involves the relative hardening of the present? Perhaps we can put it alongside Michel Foucault's comments on love and passion and use it as a third term. If love, as Foucault defines it in a collection of articles, Ethics, involves deferment and a wider ethical joy, and passion a sort of abdication of responsibility for immediate pleasure, intimacy is perhaps a place in between. In passion we might ask no more than that two bodies fuck passionately, but in intimacy we expect this connection to be more cerebral, or at least more subjective, more about a world of privacy to the detriment of the outside world. It's this interim state that films like Last Tango in Paris, Unfaithful and Intimacy have explored but it's also relevant to Before Sunrise, Les Amants and most especially Claire Denis' recent film, Vendredi Soir.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 101