Intimate Affairs (2002)

Alan Rudolph is a poor man's Robert Altman with a Henry Jaglom production value–and yet he manages to entice excellent talent to his projects. His films have never fared well at the box office, and only two (Mrs. Parker and the follow-up Afterglow) received much critical acclaim. So how he managed to spend eight million dollars on this mess is anyone's guess. It was obviously shot (predominantly) in a single location, and the wardrobe and set decoration is hardly extravagant to have merited high budgeting. While likely scripted, it has all the discipline of a free community improv class. It's perhaps apt that a movie about masturbation should prove so masturbatory in its inception: the cast are allowed free reign to over-reach in almost every scene. There is no sense that the characters are true to the time frame portrayed on screen, and yet it is not completely pointless. Some of the improvisations work, and most don't, but there is some comedy to be had in the less over-wrought interactions. When it tries, it fails, but when it fails it sometimes triumphs. I only wish there had been more happy accidents–like the camera being in the right place to capitalize on the focus of the scene. It is sadly rarely so.For a much better take on a similar subject see Joaquin Oristrell's Unconscious, instead. For a better use of an ensemble cast in a barely scripted acting exercise, see Nicholas Roeg's Insignificance. The only honest performance is Neve Campbell's, and the only subtlety is that of Terrence Howard. Nick Nolte seems like he's acting in two different movies, Alan Cumming deserves more camera time, and Jeremy Davies is completely against type.Rudolph's greatest success is that this film released in 2002 looks like a 1970s European skin flic. I am probably over-crediting him, here. But the film has its moments. It's probably best to run in the background while you do something else and cross it off your list.

If a pretentious, softcore pornographer took a single college class in human sexuality and got a D+ in it, that sort of person might enjoy Intimate Affairs.Set in 1929, this movie purports to tell the story of a group of friends and acquaintances who set out to explore human sexuality by talking about it until they're blue in the face. And while it's made to a standard of professional competence, this is a very silly and poorly written film. It's filled with two-dimensional characters engaging in some of the least provocative and least erotic sex talk you've ever heard. It's visually pedestrian and there's little plot or real character development even attempted, let alone achieved.For all that, though, there's some fairly good acting here. Nick Nolte plays Faldo, the rich man funding the sex research of disgraced college professor Edgar (Dermot Mulroney), and whatever you though of Nolte before, you'll admire his ability to take this film's ridiculous dialog and overwrought direction and create a believable human being out of it. Tuesday Weld manages to take the one-note character of Faldo's wife and turn her mixed up Russian and Brooklyn accents into the mark of a woman who's being trying to make herself into something else so long, she no longer remembers what she started out as. Alan Cumming as a frustrated artist whose sexuality is far more deviant than the rest of the conventionally minded group is also having a blast in every scene. Robin Tunney is also appealing in her simple but nuanced performance as a woman who thinks she's more sexually liberated than she really is.But, there's also some really bad acting as well. Mulroney appears genuinely flustered at his inability to do anything with the poorly conceived character of Edgar. He's more like a man tied up in a straitjacket than an actor playing a role, just trying to find some way to connect all the things about Edgar that don't fit together. Neve Campbell gives perhaps her worst performance as the shy virgin hired to be a stenographer to the story's flat and disconnected sexual discussions. If you didn't know any better, you'd think she'd never really acted before and got the job because she was banging a producer. And even though the other actors do adequate work, their characters are either so slight or so amateurishly calculated for affect that it's impossible to take them seriously.I really can't imagine what most of the fine actors in this cast were thinking when they took this job. They can't have been paid very much and they can't have actually thought these roles would do anything for their craft or their careers. Maybe they owed writer/director Alan Rudolph money, or maybe he has a ping pong table in his basement they all wanted to use.You do get to see Julie Delpy and Robin Tunney topless in this film, as well as viewing Dermot Mulroney's behind and getting a furtive glance at his exposed package. But if none of that trips your trigger, I'm not sure there's any reason to watch Intimate Affairs. You can certainly find these actors doing good work in much better films.

I have to admit I have barely managed to watch this movie to the first half. The movie is SO boring! I just have fast forwarded to the end in desperate attempt there may be at least some sex in the movie, but I have found none. The description of the film was quite interesting, but the reality was just plain dull. People sitting in the room or in the restaurant constantly speaking some blah blah blah, trying to look important or interesting. Horrid, never ending flow of talks, talks, talks, just without any sense or meaning. Bizarre group of youth "artists" and "researchers" who never had to work in their lives try to "investigate" the sexuality by some very bizarre free association method? What is this? It is not research, just some strange happening of really bored guys who try to achieve something which has no sense at all. I like the actresses, both Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney, but they turned out to be the single attraction in this pseudointellecual desert. It was not erotic, intelligent, clever, educative and most of all, it was not fun. Save your time and go to pub with friends of yours. Have a couple of drinks and have a chat about sex and sexuality - it will be way more entertaining and probably more intelligent that this crap.

As a volunteer at the Denver Film Festival, I was given the opportunity to attend a screening of this movie tonight, and I am very happy to have done so. At times I think I was the only person in the theater laughing, but I found this movie hilarious, yet relatable. The ensemble cast has wonderful chemistry, including great performances by Alan Cumming, Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Robin Tunney and Neve Campbell. Though the film might seem farfetched, it is actually based on real events, and I especially enjoyed Robin Tunney's performance as a woman with a refreshingly healthy attitude towards sex. Neither a "virgin" nor "whore," she has slept with a few men, knows what she wants and how to get it, and rather than begging the man she goes to bed with to love her and marry her, she simply asks him not to analyze it to anyone, whether it lasts or not. Another special treat is a series of films-within-the-film, shot in black and white and made (apparently through a very complicated process) to look as they would have looked in the 1920's. A lovely character-driven film that is quite different from most things you will see these days. Go see this if you get the chance.