Intimacy

Jay, a separated barman in London, and Claire, a married woman, meet in his flat every Wednesday for wordless, anonymous sex, keeping everything else about themselves out of the room. When Jay begins secretly following Claire into her life beyond their arrangement, the boundary they depend on starts to collapse.

The film is a study of avoidance and of the terror of being fully known: the very contract meant to keep intimacy out becomes the thing that lets it in. It probes how people use sex to manage the wish for and dread of closeness. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001, and is based on the novel Intimacy and the story Nightlight by Hanif Kureishi.