Painfully Pretentious Rot

Rating: 1/10 (2 April 2005)

Tedious, painfully pretentious rot about four shallow, self-abased people self-deluded and made miserable by their pursuit of rutting and by their crippling nonsense of their self-importance, self-involvement, and self-gratification (perhaps the result of education having abdicated its 'mission civilisatrice' and descended, from the early 1970's, from educating to the mistaken imbuement of - ahem - self-esteem).
The characters exist in a rarefied state absent of family, friends, coworkers and, for that matter, the whole, real world. 'Closer' is really Farther - from each other as whole, thinking, feeling humans. 'Closer' redeems nothing and no one, unlike the still-reigning champion of human relationship films: 1963's 'This Sporting Life.'
Is there a rating lower than Zero Stars? - because that's what I'd consign to this from-the-get-go crippled film which seeks, it seems, to cripple others by stabbing them in the face with its paean to self-gratification. Closer' is a reductio ad absurdum of human complexity because it cannot get over its own sophomoric nonsense of humans as purely carnal animals existing solipsistically in a noxious bubble composted of their self-important, shall we say, bovine excreta.