Once G. Taratorkin recalling A. Kaidanovsky said - there are people who disturb us ... This film is disturbing, does not let go, returns to itself. The female audience (for the most part) will find little attractive in this movie: an unorganized man, an apartment without furniture, the lack of lyrics of romanticism and, to top it all, completely animal sex. Mating. And all this is repeated, repeated, repeated. Strange movie. Ten to a maximum of fifteen minutes and you can switch channels.
Meanwhile, only after shocking the viewer, the director begins to return to the usual tracks of classical melodrama. Instinct of the male, sung in the first part of the film smoothly flows into the spiritual cries of finding his stranger. Where are you? Where are you? I know nothing about you. The proximity of the bodies only spurred the strings of the soul. Feelings awoke... Human nature makes us take the next step, the next step.
Here she is. But there is no adoration. So what now? Meetings on Wednesdays do not merge into the melody of harmony - to enjoy, drink, talk, breathe it and with it. Well, where are you, where are you? She's not around. And the world revolves around the same society - a random young flesh that divided the night, laughing and not stopping in bed chirping (he runs from her like a plague), a brother with half-mad eyes who moved to his house until Wednesday (only until Wednesday - she will come on Wednesday), a colleague at work - a bartender, to whom he can tell about his WOMAN,
and waiting,
waiting,
Waiting.
Gradually, the world of our heroine is drawn (internal and external). Her image, way of life, character, rod that fastens the fragile structure is opened by people around her and close to her - friends, husband, son.
In this part of the film there is no animal passion - now only pleasure and contemplation of what is happening. All for the viewer. And she is a woman, on the stage of the basement theater, for the viewer.
Wonderful performance in the film by Timothy Spall (husband). I haven’t seen him “since Bertolucci’s time (" Under the cover of heaven), and there he was extremely colorful with D. Malkovich. It seems that having grown up for 10 years, his hero married and safely moved from Africa to London. This is the continuity of cinema.
Of course, the film echoes the beautiful creation of Louis Malle “Damage”, the gloss of “9.5 weeks” and at the same time we have another amazing story about human relationships.
The film is about the theater, so similar to life and about life, which is so close to the theater.
Patrice Cherot, a French film and theater director, also directed opera. I started as an actor, then was a theater director, / cities and theaters I will not list /. Making a movie. /celebrated film prizes in Cannes, Berlin/, In addition, he was a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, /died several years ago /.
Jay, (Mark Railance) lives in a less-than-prestigious area of London, works as a bartender, with no spiritual interests, except on Wednesdays week, Claire, (Kerry Fox) comes to see him, with whom they have sex. No moral or ethical obligations, but one day he gets bored and decides to dot the i. While tracking Claire, Jay enters a theater studio where Claire plays in a Tennessee Williams play. There he meets Claire’s husband, taxi driver Andy, Timothy Spall.
It seems, well, who in our time is interested in theater, especially near-theatrical passions, don't tell me. Who cares about me, for example?
There is a person, an ordinary person, an ordinary life, nothing supernatural and romantic. He lives, lives, and one day discovers the world of theater. Where life is also ordinary, but not quite, life to rupture the aorta, / if you can play / so that you not only believe the audience, but also believe yourself. I thought it was not a game, it was life.
Agree, not so many films about the theater, especially made by theater directors. Especially about the connection of the real world with the world recreated acting.
Someone will be found, everything else will be found, meaning will be found, faith in meaning will be found, causeless sadness will disappear, and there will be strength and desire to live. And life will play with new colors.
Here we go. Intimacy as a tool in the search for an ideal. I cannot say that I fully agree with the author’s concept of this issue, but I believe in the possibility of such a way of spiritual search, spiritual self-expression, spiritual self-realization.
Don't tell me, theatre, I'm tired. Not interesting. Not mine. I won't. I don't. You don't have to, no one's forcing you. To each his own.
I especially love this movie. The film directed by Patrice Shero turned out so lively, so natural, as if we looked into the window of someone’s real story. From the first to the last shot, everything in the film looks believable, and there is not even a hint of falsehood. Long frank, erotic scenes, with all the ensuing consequences, do not make this film vulgar or dirty, but on the contrary make it deeper and bolder. This is all the merit of the director and a wonderful, live play previously unknown to me actors.
In this story we see the dirty quarter of London. A woman comes to the main character every Wednesday. They have sex, barely even talk, then she leaves. They both enjoyed it, and Wednesday was their day. But one day a stranger didn't come. Soon the hero will follow her and just unceremoniously invaded her life, learning that she has a child and a husband.
We see events in this story suddenly gaining momentum. The fact that the viewer becomes witnesses to long scenes of love of the main characters, they become close, and we seem to know them all our lives. Looking at them on the street, in a cafe, in the theater, these two characters become something close to the viewer. So I want them to be together, but not so simple, and life has its own rules and paradoxes.
Both heroes are not young, and they have the baggage of the past and the living present. Both heroes have children and family life. But the hero is ready to go against everything and be with her, but the stranger did not ask for it, and meetings on Wednesdays were something especially important for her, which she waited every day with anticipation. Wanting more, the main character started an irreversible cycle, and many heroes were drawn into it (meaning the family of a stranger). Could they have a future? Could they have been together? Or is it all an illusion and sweet dreams? Life is much harsher than we think, and their lives drag the heroes back, preventing them from being together.
I remember this movie as a secret story of two. Their usual sex escalated into something big, and the Wednesday meeting became insufficient. Did the protagonist fall in love with a stranger? Or was it all an illusion and self-deception? I can only say that amidst the jogging and noise, two people met each other and became something close and warm that they were so missing all their lives, but real life and commitment pulled them back.
Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox made a wonderful duet. Their game was impeccable: so pure, so real. After this film, I remember both actors well.
Intimacy is a 2000 European erotic melodrama. This movie is much deeper than it seems at first glance. A realistic story of the closeness of two who for a moment felt happiness, but both knew that it would elude them.
8 out of 10
In gray-gray, gloomy London (not the London we all dream of), in shabby brick houses and similarly gray, convoluted apartments, a man and a woman, presumably out of boredom, mate regularly on Wednesdays. They do not talk, they deliberately pretend that they do not care, at the moment of intimacy they are far away, but when they part they cannot forget everything. All that connects them is animal sex, without commitment, without restraint, natural, natural, passionate and cold at the same time, insensitive. He has a divorce, two children with whom he sometimes sees, and an icy ex; She has a stupid and believing husband, a son, and dreams of a big stage. Now, she's just playing in an amateur theater on the outskirts of town and, corny as it sounds, she likes Tennessee Williams. And, as the viewer can guess, Her dreams about the stage are futile, as is her attempt to escape from the reality of the disgraced life of a failed actress into the beautiful world of fuck with a stranger who will not ask unnecessary questions. Which is just going to work. In these beautiful moments of oblivion, there is no need to play and no need to pretend anymore, when you already know in advance that after everything you will stand up silently and go home without long explanations and unnecessary confessions about something. No, not in love, fire, but at least in sympathy.
Everyone seems to remember that the status quo in a relationship is extremely useful. Even in those non-binding ones. But the trouble is, someone will always sooner or later violate this status, a woman is a woman, but if a man does it, expect trouble. He was completely alone, His blue friends were walking around drug dens and like ordinary philosophers-underdogs, constantly trembled about the fact that it is impossible, we must admit everything, sex without talking is not love, but with him it is another matter. In fact, at least it's fair. He managed to follow her, personally destroy this image of a beautiful stranger: furious in bed, silent and decisive immediately after orgasm, ingratiating and predatory in front of his doors. And so on and so on and so on, perhaps for many years, if it were not for his foolish attempt to destroy Her life, justifying it only by the fact that She looks miserable (as if He looks different) – and this attempt is obviously doomed to failure, given the fact that She still has some psycho-emotional connection with her husband, her child. The sense of family for Her is still not lost, in general, She can "feel" at least something - and this is Her main difference from Him, a person who has abandoned all his unrealizable dreams and concentrated only on the satisfaction of basic male desires and needs.
And the finale is logical and predictable, because this relationship would be even more empty than the existing one. The condom you're supposed to wear before every intercourse is a great metaphor for post-family bachelor philosophy. Despite the extreme proximity at the time of peak, they are separated not only by a condom, but also by an unspoken agreement to keep silent about everything, even if you really want to say something. And this simple human desire to know something about the woman you fuck every Wednesday is reduced to just having sex without words on a dirty carpet on the floor of an intricate bachelor apartment and the subsequent obsessive mania of stalking through the uncomfortable streets of London. He's almost a beast, which is probably why he's so good in bed. It seems that all of His lair smelled of sperm, and there is a certain hopelessness in this, because neither She nor He is no longer twenty, but She also cherishes some, albeit ridiculous, ambitions. The desire to communicate is deliberately suppressed by the desire to fuck, and the camera deliberately and without hesitation snatches these moments of total despair. But something didn't work. And why did he think she could be interested in something more?
Unattractive, but also poorly illuminated parts of the body of the heroes are corruptible, as are their souls. They have no beauty, no sexual libido energy. The documentary camera candidly depicts people in a world where spiritual communication between the sexes no longer exists. Sex becomes mechanistic and inhumane, emphasised formal, only to shed excess seed and have pleasure, nothing more. The director seems to give the characters a unique opportunity to improve, but no – the inertia of fate is stronger than the petty animal passions that pass over time, like everything in this world. An entertaining peek at the lives of others turns into an asexual thriller about the horrors of the life of modern man in a post-industrial city of the world, where the ghost of degradation and collapse of all institutions that have somehow connected people for the past few thousand years roams the gray streets. They are not humans or animals, they are anti-Oedipian “wishing machines” with no emotions, no attachment, almost completely devoid of a sense of duty and responsibility for those they have generated. They both desire, one more, one less, and only one of them realizes that this is the way to nowhere. No one has yet invented a worthy alternative to the family, therefore, only back to the glorious past, to the family dreams, to the roots, for there is only the oblivion and emptiness of the atomized society of the new Babylon.
How many films are there that would not be pornographic, but at the same time contain at least one or two scenes so explicit that you can no longer “play” there, but you just need to include pure physiology? The meticulous encyclopedists from the cinema number no more than a few dozen in the entire history. And how many of these dozens – those where in the plot, for greater piquancy, there is no murder, no terrible vicissitudes, or even banal muzzle?! The fingers on one hand are enough. “Intim” is a true museum rarity. If there were no vocabulary, it would be an absolutely unique and unprecedented film. (But still, a miracle did not happen, and there is a place to walk around Dmitry Puchkov, better known as Goblin, this translator fundamentally translates mate.) )
Intim is the winner of the famous Berlin Film Festival in several nominations at once, but its rival, among other things, was Chocolate itself! And this is not accidental: this is Hollywood - Dream Factory, so let treat the whole world with chocolate, and here you have a real European festival film, here you are not used to almighty! The honored German ber (and Germany is a country with rich cinematic traditions!) goes to both the director, the Frenchman Shero, and to the actress, Fox's Novozeladka Fox: the first showed the world earthly love in cinema, the second, in fact, found the strength to show everything as it should be shown. The European Film Academy also noted the operator - and this is also absolutely relevant, because it is so dynamic and at the same time so clearly work with a movie camera is expensive!
Watch and listen. So-so, Iggy Pop, charming, charming, so respectful of the musical component. Delicately and conscientiously (this is how a bee works), the camera sinks - sets a rhythm under which you do not get bored for the two hours of the film. The plot, of course, can disappoint those who want to watch some terrible fairy tale for adults (another ero-thriller, the meaning of which is that even a damn sexual charm will not save the antagonist from fair punishment, and goodness with fists will necessarily triumph; or even to the banal “so don’t go where you can easily get yourself and women, and wine”). At first, everything is so promising for fans to tickle their nerves, and the basics of instincts: an unambiguous name; absolutely honest sex; His intriguing spying on Her; the appearance of a strange fruit - Her husband (this, by the way, is old Spall, a good man, who is a lot, an actor who combines such absolutely different films as Vatel, Potterian, Enchanted, The King Speaks...), near whom a gloomy and short-worded friend with fists (this is, by the way, a good man, who is still close to Him, and who is not sexually climaxed, with Him, if he is not a new boss, he is still sexually? The music and style of the cameraman kind of conjures up something like that, no? But in the process it becomes clear: “tin” will not be. So advice to those who may be confused by the fact that "Intim" belongs to the band New French Extremity. If you want obscenity, as in a French film, even the title of which is obscene - "Baise-moi", then you "Intim" to watch exactly meaningless.
If you are ready to accept the fact that in real life Hollywood passions boil extremely rarely, but the men about whom Kipling wrote something like “in the Stone Age, a man, like all animals, was wild – scary, terribly wild, and he would never become tame if not for a woman” – really a pond, that’s when “Intim” is a film for you! If you want to know, this film is closest not to New French Extremity, but to the famous novel by Somerset Maugham “Theater”, for the sake of the fact that the heroine Fox is not the best actress in England, but a semi-professional actress of a three-penny opera, on the door of which even the inscription, made into the title of the review, is “Toilets & Theatre”.
But I personally believe Kerry Fox! I mean, a really talented actress can't play a bad actress. And now this beautiful thirty-four-year-old woman laments that she, as she thinks, is talentless, but this only proves that she is a talent, she just has a small creative crisis!
So there hasn't been a word about Fox's partner in this "starring" yet? What’s worse than “9 and a half weeks”? And somehow, you know, despite the final scene where Mark Rylance discovers the ability to let down a real tear (which on stage is almost as difficult as having real sex, fact!), he's not Mickey Rourke ever. (Sorry for my French, but Rylance doesn’t need to play: anyone could play an uncle who is too lazy to bathe, shave, clean the house, help relatives, but who likes to spend time in the company of the same “middle-aged crisis” stinkers and drinkers; and then a beautiful woman comes to you on Wednesdays, who demands nothing from you but love – beauty.) He is not like Valery Obodzinsky, in whose life there was also a period when he, being a successful musician, at some point decided to become a simple man! Togo was also saved by a new woman, but this is not the case: the Londoner did not know our old stage - so he went to extort the secret of a beautiful stranger, but Alexey Glyzin advised:
I mean, I'm totally
No need to know
Everything that happened to you before,
Since you're me.
I learned to fly,
There can be no falsehood! .
Those who expected to see something more based only on the name, I will say right away, are mistaken. There will be no eroticism for adults. The first shots of the film, declared as a melodrama (however, I agree with this), show us a real, sometimes harsh and dirty reality. Unshaven legs, a body with sagging fat in certain places, as well as the abundant presence of hair there. In short, all naturalness without embellishment.
Two young heroes meet once a week for sex. They try to drink coffee and talk, but both realize it's too much. So they lash out at each other with an unprecedented passion, as if it were a first experience. (Does age matter to passion?)
About Jay, we know he's the head bartender at some café. He has a family and children, occasionally he visits them, but for some reason prefers to live in a shabby apartment. Where on the dirty floor, next to lying clothes and other stuff, there are love pleasures. Not hygienic and not at all passionate. As a rule, quickly, barely beginning. Every time Jay looks like a hungry beast.
He is not a romantic character, and the lover is not the best. I have to ask Claire why she comes every time. Does she really need to have sex with him? Tracked, she's drawn not just for that.
At work and at other times, heroes try to solve their pressing problems. They meet with friends and think about freedom. Everyone has their own opportunities and their own freedom, whether it’s in sex or something else. Honestly, everything seemed uninteresting and boring.
Nothing is known about her, and Jay decides to correct the flaw - he begins to follow Claire, learns what she does, and even gets carried away by her passion for the theater. It's another diversity in his life.
To conclude, Jay (possibly in midlife crisis) decides to diversify his life by having a mistress. He does not suffer, unlike Claire. His "intimate" dilutes the boring and gray life. Moreover, he tries to distinguish for himself the pleasure received with his wife and mistress.
Apparently, the film has a lot in common with our reality. I suppose it should be seen by mature people. The youthful mind is unlikely to understand the hardships of adult life. I suppose having lovers can be a normal thing, it remains to ask how he passes it through himself, and suggest that he at least look at how this happens in others.
For me, the picture remained not fully conscious. Perhaps this is due to my worldview, or a storyline described in a boring way. But I feel one thing with certainty – it undoubtedly reflects a fully existing reality.
P.S. For the fact that sex is shown as such, without embellishment and foreplay, I add a point.
6 out of 10
Some people have a rather strange trait. Receiving the bandwagon from fate, instead of the logical “rise, arm, win”, they begin their free fall, striving to reach the social and physical bottom. Closed in, they build a wall of mountains of garbage, fallen plaster, empty evening walks, incomprehensible friends and depressive melodies of worn CDs. From this rubbish they sincerely try to create the illusion of any movement. "Hey, we're still falling," they shout, even though they've long been chained to a pointless point on the ceiling. In the film of Patrice Shero “Intim”, who managed to collect three Bears at once in Berlin, such a person is called Jay.
Intim immerses us in the Block (of course, adjusted for time and place) atmosphere of cheap areas of London. It is here in the evenings over the restaurants shapelessly curves the disc, behind the bar sit drunkards with the eyes of rabbits, and at the appointed hour there is a Stranger. It has no silks or fog. It's just sex. And not a romanticized act, promising to become the only bright spot in this dirty, god-forgotten corner. No, it's animal intercourse, a mechanical play played from memory by the body. Nerve fingers, coveted breasts, tired dick – all these are actors just like the people to whom they belong. Jay never called her, never even dreamed of her. But today, here and now, She has become so suddenly an attempt to escape from the surrounding reality. No explanation, no background. And what stories and legends need a man for six years working in a bar. A man who left his wife and children. A man who has filled his life with boxes of unnecessary memories.
Even if he asked, he would have nothing to say. Her name is Claire. She's married. There's a baby. Her life is unbearable. The only thing that somehow saves from the freshness of everyday life is a semi-amateur theater, where she plays in the evenings, and a dramatic circle, where she tries to teach. But all this tarnished tinsel, a cheap shiny wrapper, in which for some reason they forgot to put real life. A life where there would be love, burning passion, crazy sex. Feelings for which you would want to pack a bag and without words rush to the other end of the city only to disappear for a few moments in the arms of others. And Claire made up those feelings, trying to find the coveted painkiller in Jay. But the recommended pill only for minutes relieves symptoms in order to return in the morning with aching headache.
The loneliness of ruthless rust to the accompaniment of David Bowie’s glam chants, mixed with Nick Cave’s spells, eats away at the hearts and souls of former people. But were they ever alive? No wonder the outlandish elysium in the middle of the narrative rises amateur theater. It is an outlet, an impenetrable mask, behind which you can hide scraps of pain. Everyone here plays to the best of their talent and preferences. Someone in a drama club, someone in a pool, and someone starts the most dangerous game - a game of truth. And the truth is that Claire is a very mediocre actress with a heap of ambition. Jay is a living dead man who buried himself in a shabby apartment littered with undisassembled boxes. And the only truly living character in this life drama is Claire's husband, played by Timothy Spall. During the time allotted to him on the screen, he manages to turn from a charming guy shirt, a caring husband, proud of his wife’s success, into an angry animal that, despite its destructive hysteria, more causes pity than fear. And pity, as we well remember, only humiliates a person.
The last explanation with Claire is like a control shot to the head. Jay didn't need sex on his own, as the noisy disco shows. He needed feelings so that he could get back on his feet, throw off the shell of indifference, break the impenetrable mask of selfishness. Instead, fate once again set the bandwagon. Only this time, the bartender is ready to hit. He put up a block that is very difficult to break through. The truth is not in guilt, but the key to the happiness of others is given to Him. And it, as it should, will dissolve in the flow of endless transport. And on the cold autumn street fall the warm rays of the last sun, decorating yesterday’s inconspicuous houses in yellow colors.
9 out of 10
They meet every Wednesday at the apartment Jay rents in a cheap and little-noticed London block. He lives here separately from his family, his wife and two children, whom he visits from time to time, but no longer feels much need. Claire is a different matter. At the hour of duty she rings the doorbell, he silently opens.
After a couple of moments, they begin to nervously pull off each other’s clothes, and then indulge in such unrestrained sex that the animal world with its instincts in comparison with their basic rest. In rough anatomical acts, both spill out their unrealized energy, literally biting into the flesh of the partner. At the same time, they do not ask each other about anything, and the history of their acquaintance remains somewhere behind the scenes. Perhaps they just concurred on the advert for a "pornographic connection."
However, sometimes Jay can offer her a cup of tea, but it is rather an exception to the rules of the already established ritual, in which everything is controlled by pure physiology. Then they also silently part, making no promises, and go about their normal business for a week. But when one day she does not appear at the conditional hour, he ceases to find a place for himself.
The rhythm of his life breaks down, as a certain important link falls out of it. Jay goes looking for Claire and almost accidentally finds her. It turns out that she is an actress of a seedy basement theater, where her husband (a harmless chatty taxi driver) and a small son necessarily come to each performance. And while Claire plays in Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Jay has provocative conversations with her husband, telling a kind of abstract story about a certain anonymous bond between a man and a woman.
The well-known truth “sex brings together” reveals here a contradictory, even mutually exclusive essence of such key concepts as family, love, sex. It turns out that with much greater success they can exist separately from each other. And the main tool in the relationship of two dissatisfied with the life of single people is sex, which creates the most real of all possible contacts.
Conversely, the feeling that suddenly awoke in Jay after Claire’s non-appearance becomes for both partners that not only does not contribute to the rapprochement, but finally breaks the bond. Feeling kills intimacy, which is much more convenient to do without it. And anonymous sex is a short but guaranteed pleasure every Wednesday, perhaps not the best, but at least some compensation for a bad life.
And when Jay tries to complicate the relationship model by falling in love with Claire, she already knows that feelings should not be mixed in. Therefore, the persistent desire of the partner to turn a simple sexual relationship into a love affair finally destroys everything that originally binds both. As a result, the desire for a new meeting turns into a tired awareness of its impossibility.
French director Patrice Shero manages to break through the asceticism of author’s cinema, through the stingy pathos of sexual passion for the deep, but, in general, bitter truth about inflation of unshakable life-affirming values. He artistically legitimizes animal morality and makes a deeply pessimistic conclusion that sex without love is not only more natural, but also more pure. And all attempts to fill it with feeling are flawed and doomed.
Shero declares the beginning of the era of verbal inflation, when feelings and words begin to play the role of destroyers, not creators. In such a situation, only silence saves from scandals and clarification of relations. In contrast to Tarkovsky, he says, “In the beginning there was a body.”
With the advent of this film, the fashion for pornographic connections is no longer a conceptual phenomenon, but a common place. At the same time, Intimacy gives a disappointing, but honest answer to the question: “What happens after sex?”
He wanted her passionately. At first he wanted her only when she came to him at the agreed time on Wednesdays, and both of them, almost without talking, went to the lower room, where the bed was carefully spread out on the carpet, undressed silently and quickly, and merged in one aspiration that recognized no boundaries and did not need words. Everything was like in a wonderful half-sleep: inflamed intermittent breathing, matte shine of flesh, attracting the roundness of the genitals ... The bliss of unaccountability consumed him whole, and he, thinking of nothing but strength, moved farther and farther, toward complete unity, in which his burning desire could triumph and die. The desire, however, proved capricious and ceased as suddenly as it began, without warning or preparation, leaving them both bewildered by a relaxed, tart taste of frustration. Everything happened quite quickly, and she, slowly dressing and reluctantly leaving, as if regretting something lost or never received, seemed to think about something, doubt something.
Then came the usual everyday life, he went to his bar, where he worked as a senior bartender and recently he was assigned a funny young gay assistant, led to non-binding conversations with him, with visitors, met with his two young sons, trying to talk as little as possible with their mother, with whom he broke up a year or two ago. It was as if nothing had changed in his life, and he, not in the habit of delving into his feelings, carelessly shrugged off the strange vague anxiety that settled in his soul and pulled his tenacious fingers further and further. And he didn't want to admit to himself that he was looking forward to every new environment with growing eagerness, and his desire appeared long before that day, and became more and more hot, as if he had thrown off his shoulders twenty years of living. And Wednesday came, at the appointed hour she stood on the threshold of his apartment, and everything was repeated at the beginning. But something changed every time. He was used to their mutual silence, he accepted the rules of the game and, like her, was pragmatic. But he increasingly caught himself thinking that he wanted to talk to her, ask her about life, about what she does, whether she is married, whether she has children. The impossibility of such a conversation, the absence of the space in which it could arise, burdened him more and more, and more and more interfered with the solution of the practical problem of satisfying his desire. Is it not for this reason that the desire itself became so capricious and went away instantly, without demand and whenever it pleased, like the poet’s muse?
It couldn't last long. Something had to happen that would break this incomprehensible connection and reveal the mistake one of them had made. And of course it happened... She didn't come in one Wednesday. And all his creeping fears, all tormenting questions, caustic suspicions and burning desires at once rushed to the will and, unchecked by anything, arranged a hellish dance. He didn't know how he lived the week before the following Wednesday, or if he lived at all. All people, deeds, events were perceived by him as a continuous distant ghostly haze, and he held on only thanks to machine habits worked out over the years. He suddenly realized that he could not live without her, that he could not continue to be in the dark about who she was, where she lives, what she does. The realization of this horrified him, but it was too late. Events were stronger than him, they pulled with the mechanical inevitability of the locomotive, and he had to obey. After a meeting the following Wednesday, he followed her discreetly and ended up at a play in a small semi-amateur theater, where she starred. He knew nothing of the art of theatrical art, but he looked only at it without interruption, with a new sense of the triumph of the finder growing in him. Here, in the theater, he met her husband, whose task was to listen to the feedback of the audience about her performance. And he started his own game.
He began to haunt her with regular visits to the theater. He began to provoke her husband with slippery talk of adultery. He felt confident in himself and went on without looking back and not noticing that she also wanted to call him out, talk to him, hear a sincere word from him. He focused on his goal, although, in fact, he did not know what it was. He was like a stalking predator who wanted to take possession of his prey. And he didn't care about her husband's feelings or her own feelings. And he was sure that now it would be completely his — because where before him her husband, ugly fat man with bulging eyes and protruding lip! But he was wrong. He made a mistake now that he felt calm and confident. He spoke in his favor, he had all the cards on his hands. But he lost.
