Patrice Chereau favors moody, dark-hued stuff on the soundtrack of Intimacy; like countrywoman Claire Denis, he knows the value of a good Tindersticks song. The swooning "Tiny Tears," which opens Chereau’s movie, perfectly sets the tone for what is to follow, the story of a near-anonymous sexual liaison that almost destroys its lovers, or perhaps merely exposes the rot already in the wood. Stuart Staples, the band’s singer, is like a less shamanistic Nick Cave, which is to say he’s in love with darkness, but not quite sure if he wants to settle down.

We never find out how Jay (Mark Rylance) and Claire (Kerry Fox) began their weekly rendezvous, especially since, until things start to spiral seriously out of control, they hardly exchange any words at all. Chereau, who, with Anne-Louise Trividic, adapted Hanif Kurieshi’s stories "Intimacy" and "Night Light," withholds all but the barest of information for nearly half the movie’s length. Jay, we know, is a once-married barman who now lives in a filthy, basement-level room adorned with stacks of CDs and a rotting armchair.

Claire proves more elusive, since the movie is, at least initially, filmed from Jay’s point of view. While they’ve apparently agreed not to discuss themselves, the utter lack of connection in his life starts to wear on Jay, and he starts following Claire after their meetings. The camera, though, doesn’t endorse his quasi-stalking. It’s only after Claire shakes the pursuit, hides in a doorway, and then starts following Jay that the movie shifts perspective and we see her without him around. She is, we finally learn, a housewife who’s taken up acting late in life, with a devoted if none-too-aware husband (Timothy Spall) and children. Unlike Jay, who skipped out on his own family several years back, she’s not alone, and yet something keeps pulling her to this stranger, this "Wednesday man."

In each of the last several years, there’s been some movie, usually from France, which stirs up a fuss over its sexual explicitness, Romance and POLA X and Baise-Moi being notable examples. But despite their desperate taboo-shattering, none of these movies has used sex to tell a story, only to smite the audience with some (invariably unpleasant) idea. In Intimacy, the sex makes sense. It’s the first movie I’ve seen where the characters actually look like they’re having sex, not in a reductive, what-goes-where sense (although Fox and Rylance cross some of those boundaries as well), but because the actors flawlessly capture the nuances and the negotiations, their bodies explaining everything their words do not. Their encounters are unglamorous, mainly taking place on the dingy floor of Jay’s flat, but Chereau doesn’t rub our noses in it. The cool light filters through the basement windows, exposing Fox and Rylance’s imperfect bodies, and the camera never blinks.

In fact, so much is expressed by the sex scenes that the long stretches of dialogue which eventually take over the movie seem unnecessary. Claire confides in Betty (Marianne Faithful), a student in one of her acting classes, and Jay covertly befriends Claire’s husband, but what comes out of these conversations is less revealing and certainly less distinctive than what’s gone before. Spall in particular does a magnificent job with his scenes, delving even deeper into wounded male pride than he did in Secrets and Lies, but suddenly Intimacy is just a well-shot movie with better-than-average dialogue, rather than a unique experience.

"The most important decisions in life are made between two people in bed," Billy Bragg once sang, and though his voice wouldn’t fit on the soundtrack, the words have never seemed more apt. Jay and Claire’s flirtation with self-annihilation is the stuff of many modern movies, more fashionable and in some ways less challenging than its positive counterpart. But Intimacy makes real people of them, not nihilistic chessu pieces. It’s a cold movie, but not an oppressive one, and most importantly not in love with its own death. Chereau doesn’t need to flaunt his ability to capture characters at the end of the line. It’s a complex movie, but in form almost classically simple. In a sense, it insists on its own ordinariness, but that’s the most extraordinary thing about it.

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