Intimacy, a controversial portrait of adultery, beat heavy favourite Traffic to take the Silver Bear award for best film at the Berlin Film Festival last night. The film's female lead Kerry Fox won the best actress award, while the Oscar-nominated Traffic player Benicio del Toro was named best actor.
"You can imagine how beautiful this is for me," said Intimacy director Patrice Chereau upon accepting the festival's premiere award. All week, the French film-maker had been forced to defend his picture from charges that it is self-consciously provocative and explicit. At one stage the director became so exasperated at a press conference that he refused to answer any more questions over the film's sexual content. Based on the novel by Hanif Kureishi, the film stars Fox as a bored housewife who embarks on a tragic affair with a London bartender (Mark Rylance). Primarily set in a shabby London flat, the film's centrepiece is an unbroken 35-minute sex scene.
The other big winners at the Berlin Film Festival were Taiwanese film-maker Lin Cheng-sheng who took the best director award for his movie Betelnut Beauty and Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas who was presented with the Golden Bear lifetime achievement award. Now aged 84 and hampered by a stroke that he suffered five years ago, Douglas took the stage to accept his award in person. In a brief interview, he said that he was more proud of his political activism than his movies but said he would still leap at the chance of working with Steven Soderbergh (who cast Kirk's son Michael in Traffic). "I have learned one thing in life," Douglas told the assembled throng. "Never, never give up."
