INTIMATE RELATIONS
No one could be more the model of a decent, upstanding wife and mother than the fiftyish Marjorie Beasley (Julie Walters). She, her husband Stanley (Matthew Walker), and their 14-year-old daughter Joyce (Laura Sadler) live in a small town in England. Who would dream that hormones are raging uncontrollably in Marjorie's blood? Her husband, a WWI veteran who lost his leg in the war, is treated by Marjorie like so much dirt, to the point where she does not share a bedroom with him. Instead he has been relegated to a cubicle. The bedroom now belongs to her and Joyce. In other times, Marjorie would not have married Stanley but this was after the war when men were in short supply.
Based on a real event that shocked the nation, (99% of the facts are true according to the writer) the film opens with Harold (Rupert Graves) a young man with an unhappy childhood and just out on parole answering an ad for a lodger. Once ensconced in his bedroom, Harold quickly discovers what Marjorie meant when she advertised bed and board. Dressed in curlers and an old bathrobe she enters his room and pleads for a little "cuddling.". Surprised and reluctant at first, he soon succumbs. Harold had spent all of his young life in institutions and lacks the will or ability to say "No." Marjorie, in her perversity, and now having what she wants and loving it, gives him no rest.
The film turns even blacker as daughter Joyce (in a fine bit of acting by Sadler) joins in by demanding that she be allowed in bed with Harold and Marjorie; permission is granted. Even when husband Stanley becomes aware, he is too browbeaten to make a fuss. Thus, behind the lace curtains that look out on the quiet street, some weird antics are going on which can lead to no good; someone is going to get badly hurt.
The very title speaks of euphemisms. The newspaper articles on which the story was based never used the word "sex." The English of that period used catch phrases; hence "intimate relations."
Written and Directed by Philip Goodhew.
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Copyright 1997 Ben Hoffman
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