Intimate Relations

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Intimate Relations

Directed by	Philip Goodhew
Produced by	Angela Hart Lisa Hope John Slan Jon Slan
Written by	Philip Goodhew
Starring	Julie Walters Rupert Graves Matthew Walker Laura Sadler Holly Aird
Music by	Lawrence Shragge Lawrence Shrag (song)
Cinematography	Andres Garreton
Editing by	Pia Di Ciaula
Distributed by	Handmade Films (prod.)
Release date(s)	1996
Running time	105 min.
Country	U.K. / Canada
Language	English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Intimate Relations is a 1996 British movie. It was the first movie by writer and director Philip Goodhew and starred Rupert Graves and Julie Walters. It also starred a fifteen-year-old Laura Sadler, the first and only feature film in her short career.

It is a drama and black comedy about a young man who has an affair with the middle-aged housewife he is lodging with. Matters are soon complicated when the housewife's teenage daughter gets involved after developing a crush on the young lodger.

The film takes place in the 1950s in the suburbs of London. The theme of the movie is exposing the hypocrisy of prudish attitudes, the way the upstanding residents of a seemingly respectable household are, behind closed doors, indulging in the sort of sordid goings on they would publicly sneer at.

The title comes from an old fashioned euphemism of British newspapers for sex, particularly in kiss and tell stories featuring celebrities. Reports often wrote that "...and intimate relations took place between them", simply meaning the people involved in the story had sex with one another.

[edit] Plot outline

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Marjorie Beaslie (Walters) is a housewife in her forties who takes in a lodger named Harold Guppey (Graves), who has just stumbled into town to look up his long-lost brother (played by Les Dennis). Although seemingly prudish (she no longer sleeps in the same bed as her husband, for "medical reasons"), Marjorie takes a liking to Harold despite him being a good twenty-years her junior. They begin to have a clandestine affair, sneaking into bed together at night. Ever since taking in her lodger, Marjorie insists that Harold refer to her as "mum", giving more than a little oedipal slant to their subsequent lustful antics.

Marjorie's youngest daughter is thirteen-year-old Joyce (Sadler), a precocious, Lolita-like girl who alternates between trying to act grown up by putting on make up and smoking cigarettes, and acting childish by grossing people out with tales of medieval punishments and giggling at rude words.

Joyce is fascinated by Harold and with her teasing behaviour she cunningly turns him from being apathetic towards her to being intruiged by her. At one point, she catches Harold in bed with her mum, but seemingly does not realise what they are up to and merely thinks they're having an innocent "bunk up". She talks her way into getting them to let her climb into the bed, and Harold and Marjorie continue their intimate relations whilst Joyce is asleep, or rather, pretending to be and steadily realising what is actually going on. A few days later, Joyce blackmails Harold into take her to a hotel for the night, where he turns the tables on her and all but seduces her before spurning her.

Marjorie's husband, Stanley, is a one-legged World War II veteran, who sleeps in a separate room from his wife and is as oblivious to all the sordid antics of his wife and daughter as the rest of the suburban neighbourhood is.

Sick of being caught between a mother and daughter, who are too old and too young for him respectively, Harold tries to get out of the house and move away, but Marjorie manages to emotionally blackmail him into coming back.

One day, Harold takes Marjorie and Joyce out for a picnic, although things are tense between the trio. Having sent her daughter Joyce away to play, Marjorie begins to ravish Harold, but Joyce returns and hits her mother with an axe. Harold panics and attempts to get Marjorie into the car to take her to hospital but, with blood streaming down her face, Marjorie manages to pick up a knife Harold drops and attacks him with it. Harold fights Marjorie off and stabs her to death. Joyce then tries to attack Harold and so he stabs her to death too. Finally, Harold stabs himself in the stomach in an attempt to emphasise that is actions were out of self-defence. The post-script to the movie say that he was sentenced to death for Joyce's murder bit it was commuted to life imprisonment, and that a charge of murding Marjorie was dropped due to lack of evidence.

[edit] Inspiration

The movie is based on the true story of Albert Goozee, who was put on trial in 1956 in England. He was arrested after his landlady and her teenaged daughter were found murdered. Goozee was tried only for the murder of the teenaged girl (Joyce, in the movie), convicted and imprisoned for life. The movie follows Goozee's own version of events, portraying him as an increasingly desperate young man caught in a love triangle between a mother and daughter, although as the only survivor there is no way of verifying if his version of the events was entirely truthful.

Goozee was released from prison in 1971 but was imprisoned again in 1996 (the year Intimate Relations came out) for unrelated sex offences. [1]