![]() ![]() Harold is too much an emotional basket case to cope with this powerhouse in hair rollers, and too inarticulate to seek help. What keeps the story blackly funny and not just bleak - aside from expert use of period detail and corny pop songs - is that the characters’ actions are so often at odds with their speech. Pretty soon, he’s caught in a multigenerational tug of war, and all three prove themselves capable of blackmail, both emotional and literal. The wrinkle is that the pushing-50 matron rarely makes a move without her daughter, and thus sees little wrong with having Laura in the bed when she’s giving her surrogate son his nightly tuck-in. On one level, this odd coupling works, since the pent-up Marjorie hasn’t slept with her oafish hubby in years, and Harold gets all his needs met in one handy package. He responds by having “Mum” tattooed on his arm. At the party for Joyce’s 13th birthday, an innocent game of spin-the-bottle gives Marjorie a chance to give her boarder a peck by nightfall, she’s crawling into bed with the startled lad. Beasley gives Harold all the tender care a boy could want. Their daughter, Joyce (Laura Sadler), is a sweet-tempered girl with an odd interest in morbid tales. Bewhiskered, and frequently bewildered, Stanley (Matthew Walker) bravely lost his leg in World War I, and Marjorie (Julie Walters) is renowned for her homemaking skills. ![]() When the brother’s wife (Liz McKechnie) gives him the cold shoulder, he takes up lodgings with the respectably middle-class Beasleys. Grim work, indeed, but powerful nonetheless.Brit actor Rupert Graves plays Harold Guppy, an orphaned drifter and merchant marine who washes up in an English coastal town (pic was actually shot in Wales) with little more than his estranged brother’s address to build a new life on. Taken as a comedy or nightmare (and in the end it's a nightmare, surely), it's still a powerful piece of work. Goodhew's taboo-juggling is a minor miracle, as are the performances by Walters, Graves, and Sadler (who evokes the coquettish pout and leer of an earlier, less debauched Lolita). ![]() As one exiting audience member mentioned, “It's funny like Spanking the Monkey was” - jokes in the most skillful of hands. Do you laugh at this disintegrating family unit, cry, shriek, or what? It's a rhetorical question, really you get out of it what you take in, and while some audience members may be fully shocked at what ultimately transpires, others may find it all uproarious. It works because it never quite oversteps these self-imposed boundaries. Vaguely reminiscent of some of David Lynch's more surreal works, Intimate Relations never quite steps full into the twilight zone of rampant imagination, though with its hyperreal colorings and retro-camp sets, the film stumbles perilously close. Good old-fashioned English propriety gone off the deep end is what Goodhew is skewering here and he does it all with an accomplished, rapier wit. From here it grows, overtaking Joyce, Harold, and Marjorie until the lines between romance, lust, and madness blur in a violent, violet haze, and old Stanley totters drunkenly on the landing, oblivious to it all. Beasley also lets it be known that her home life lacks certain epicurian facets that she hungers for, and before you can say obsessive/compulsive, the good Mum has flung herself into the sack with the dodgy lodger. ![]() Joyce isn't the only one, however, who finds the bewildered Guppy attractive. The couple's young daughter Joyce (Sadler), a not-quite-yet sexually active nymphet, soon takes a liking to Guppy, a sad young man who is apparently the victim of a bizarre and unhappy childhood. While she attends to the daily chores of cleaning the dust from the banister, doing the laundry, and so on, her handicapped veteran husband Stanley putters down to the local pub and crawls inside a lager keg. Intimate Relations is a dark, depressingly off-kilter black comedy based on “a true story.” In a small village outside of London in 1954, lodger Harold Guppy (Graves) has come to live in the Beasley household, a strict, prim, and altogether proper family unit lorded over by the dour and utterly practical Marjorie Beasley (Walters). ![]()
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