Rampantly joyless, often intelligent

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2005)

I am not surprised to read that CLOSER is also play since I left the theater thinking that this doesn't seem like a story to be filmed. There is precious little to work with here cinematic ally but Nichols likes his bleakness, cold lighting, dull colors and he is right at home with those techniques in this movie. These are four joyless characters, and the filming reflects this--there is nothing sensual about the movie--no colors, no soft textures, no food, no wine, nothing that reminds us of the link between sensuality and love. And that's an important missing ingredient since love is paraded around as the the subject of all of their conversations. CLOSER is love minus the joy of feeling, which is to say, the opposite of love. Lack of sensuality is what makes pornography and CLOSER isn't far from that kind of portrayal.
These characters are one dimensional and they strike the same note too often, but let's toss aside realism and viewed from a metaphorical perspective of power masked as love, the movie succeeds. At one point a character says "this is not a war" but of course it is. What else could you call deliberate cruelty in order to gain power over another? The women and men vie for power and the men are also at war with each other. I recognized male sexuality as territoriality easily in the film but the female sexuality was harder to pin down (ah, no pun intended). The female roles in this movie are something I've never quite seen before, as equally brutal about sexuality and power as are the men. There is no effort in this movie to walk the fine line between Madonna and whore--which is, of course, closer to the truth. I think the movie misses the mark, however, in that there is almost no exploration into the women's feelings about each other. There is an implicit sexism in this movie in that men can sustain many conflicts whereas women can only handle one gender at a time. We all know this isn't true and the movie suffers a little from this lack of recognition. As anyone knows, relationships between women after the same men are complicated, highly charged and very interesting. The one scene between the women merely serves to set up another scene between a couple. What a HUGE letdown. Kundera didn't do that to us in THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, by the way. Note how that scene in Kundera's book and in the movie adds an entire layer to the story that CLOSER lacks altogether. It doesn't have to be kindness that these women find, of course, but they would have feelings about one another equally as interesting as those with which the men grapple. That was the missed opportunity to strike another note, in my opinion.
There is talk of children between the couples but this sounds as depthless as the conversations about love. They know what they're supposed to say and do only they have no idea how to reconcile the fact that they don't want to say or do those things. Society, although open to new roles for women (by economic necessity in my opinion), is still a restrictive force. Celibacy means failure; multiple partners means failure. One is supposed to exist only in the "happy couples" format once one reaches a certain age. This is also one of those movies where no one has any parents or friends, heightening the importance of their romances and their dalliances.
This movie got one thing right, though--the old adage is b.s. on screen--the closest way to a man's heart is not through his stomach. Just ask Godard and Fellini.