A Closed Book

Plot synopsis:
Sir Paul (Tom Conti) is an art critic and writer who was blinded in a car crash. He lives alone in a large mansion in the UK. He is looking for an amanuensis or "ghost writer" to help him write his final book, an autobiography, and interviews several unsuccessful candidates until Jane Ryder (Daryl Hannah) applies for the position. Because she is intelligent and forthright, Sir Paul hires her, and he explains to her she will now be living in the house and introduces Mrs. Kilbride (Miriam Margolyes), the cook and housekeeper. He then goes on to divulge his claustrophobia and "terrific fear of the dark," despite him being blind, and asks that the lights be switched on at, "exactly the same time as they would be in any normal house."
Jane begins to explore the mansion by herself, noting how a good amount of the furniture is covered in white dust cloths, before stumbling upon a teddy bear with one eye. She picks up the bear and snaps the eye off of its face. A shot of a painting is then inexplicably shown along with the sounds of a child's laughter.
They have breakfast together and discuss their pet annoyances, with Sir Paul getting disproportionately angry about Jane saying "no problem" repeatedly. He asks her to bring to his attention anything he does that she finds irritating, if any. She then states that his saying, "poor," as an adjective, describing it as patronizing. Sir Paul then tells Jane that he can both hear her smile and think. Sir Paul begins dictating his book, which he decides to call, "A Closed Book," to Jane while she types on her computer. Sir Paul again gets very angry at Jane for not taking his instructions. After they finish writing, Sir Paul asks Jane to buy a puzzle of a specific painting as a favor, which she agrees to do. He later asks her to call his agent to deliver the news about his new book being in the works. Jane dials the phone and speaks with someone before telling Sir Paul that his agent is currently out of the country and not available. Things run smoothly until Jane starts changing things ever so slightly, like taking paintings out of their frames and turning them upside down. Her true purpose at the mansion starts to become even more questionable when she begins to lie to Sir Paul, stating that she had been wearing a red gown when she was wearing jeans and a shirt, and sets a few of his books ablaze in the fireplace. Sir Paul begins to question Jane's personal life, specifically her love life, but she is divulges little and asks that the subject be changed. Sir Paul starts to suspect Jane when she sends Mrs. Kilbride home for a week without consulting him.
While singing in the bath, he keeps hearing strange noises, which are really Jane attempting to scare him. While he is in the bath, someone turns the light off, and then Jane comes in naked and claims that the light is still on, to reassure him. She leaves the bathroom and the audience is then shown another shot of the teddy bear followed by a painting of a young girl playing with a teddybear and the sound of children's laughter.
Jane's lying and sneaking becomes more and more obvious as she lies to him about Madonna dying and O. J. Simpson committing suicide. Sir Paul becomes very suspicious when Mrs. Kilbride returns to the house and she finds a puzzle that Sir Paul asked Jane to purchase, and it turns out to be the wrong puzzle. This particularly matters to Sir Paul as he wrote about the painting in his book, and he gets very angry at her and begins to lose trust in her. Jane assures Sir Paul that nothing like this will ever happen again. Later, Mrs. Killbride calls to inform them that her husband may have lung cancer and that she won't be able to work again for some time.
Sir Paul's suspicions are assuaged when a Conservative MP visits his house to persuade him to vote for the Conservatives. Because of her fear of Sir Paul, she responds positively to all of his questions, and she reads aloud what Jane has written in his book after he insists she do it for him. Fortunately for Jane, her transcription of his words on the computer are accurate. Jane later escalates her campaign against him, and one day she leaves a suit of armour lying on the floor, and displaces several desks and a number of books. She knows that Sir Paul will walk into them, which will cause him to trip and fall down the stairs. She then comes back into the house. Sir Paul dials his agent for the first time in the film and finds out that he was in fact at his office the whole time and had never taken a trip.
Eventually, Sir Paul realizes that Jane is attempting to kill him, and he has a confrontation with her, in his bedroom. She tells him that her late husband, Ralph, had once had an art exhibition at a prestigious gallery, where he had been severely criticized by Sir Paul. It is revealed that the quick shots of paintings shown throughout the film are in fact the works of her late husband. Due to the subject material of his paintings, Ralph had been arrested and accused of being a pedophile. He later killed himself. After comparing Sir Paul to "a closed book," and declaring that she must destroy him the way he destroyed Ralph, Jane shoves him into a wardrobe and she leaves the house, with Sir Paul screaming after her. However, when she returns to the house out of guilt, and because she lacks the capacity to kill someone, Jane discovers that Sir Paul has escaped from the closet. He had called Mrs. Killbride with a phone that he had forgotten was in his pocket from a previous scene, telling her that he had locked himself in the wardrobe. Then, Sir Paul points a gun at Jane, and explains that Ralph killed himself because he could not stand the truth about himself, that he knew what Sir Paul had written about him was true. Sir Paul then confesses that he saw this "proxy child abuse" in the paintings because he saw his own secret in the paintings. Sir Paul, too, is a pedophile. He invites Jane to shoot him, but she leaves the house instead. As she drives away, Sir Paul shoots himself inside the mansion.

Tags: revenge

Review:
Ruiz transcends mediocre material.
As A Closed Book begins, distinguished author Sir Paul is planning on writing his first book since a head injury that made him completely blind four years previously.
In order to do this he needs a helper so he hires Jane Ryder, an intelligent but mysterious woman who agrees to live with him in his baroque mansion five days a week.
Sir Paul is unsurprisingly a fussy, arrogant man who would likely be hard for anyone to deal with.
Still, it's hard not to feel sympathy for him as it quickly becomes clear that Jane takes sadistic pleasure in deceiving him.
This starts out harmlessly enough with lies about a jigsaw puzzle and made up news stories about the murder of Madonna and the suicide of O.J. Simpson but progresses into harmful territory as she begins to rearrange the furniture and leave books on the stairs.
The last few minutes of the film involve some hastily applied twists that don't really give the viewer much of a chance to comprehend the way the situation has changed before the next one appears.
As suspense thrillers go, this is pretty standard fare in the plot department.Since this is a film by maverick auteur Raoul Ruiz the writing is naturally the least important part of the film; as usual his films rely on his unique sensibilities to succeed.
For a Ruiz film A Closed Book is fairly low key: there are plenty of unusual angles and the frame tends to be filled with sumptuous details but the camera movements are standard save for the scene in which Jane brazenly tells Sir Paul nonsensical lies as the camera spins wildly directly overhead.
There is also an emphasis on the house's architecture, particularly the baroque exterior with its spirals and turrets.
A Closed Book is not a film that breaks new ground for Ruiz, in fact the style calls to mind all of the Ruiz films I've seen from the past decade or so including Time Regained, Comedy of Innocence, and That Day but his style is so rich that he could easily spend another twenty years working within it and not exhaust its possibilities.Somewhat perversely for a film released this year, A Closed Book has already been released on R2 DVD.
It's also worth noting that the film seems to have been universally judged by the least important aspect of this particular work: the script.
This surely accounts for its absurdly low IMDb score (4.7 as of this writing) and the score of negative reviews it has received from critics who view it as a genre film..
Not as bad as some reviews make out.
I have just finished watching the film and as I have never read the book, I viewed it with no expectations.
If you're after action a fast paced movie then this probably isn't for you as the drama unfolds at a slow to medium pace.
Tom Conti and Daryl Hannah do a pretty good job in the role and are the glue that hold the film together.
I won't go into what the film is about as that would render it pointless to watch but I will add that this is the not the kind of movie that you can watch over and over again but will find satisfying for the one viewing if you like suspense mysteries.
In conclusion, it's not the best film i've seen, but I did enjoy it so I gave it a 7..
Hammy But Good Fun. Saw this in a preview today.
If you like Sleuth, then this is a poor man's relation.
Very theatrical, and in fact best suited to the stage than the big screen, this film documents the mind games played out between a reclusive blind author and his new live in assistant.
Daryl Hannah can't act for toffee in the latter role but does please the boys by getting her kit off, although how it advances the plot defeats me....Tom Conti plays the eccentric art critic author to a tee, and holds the whole thing together...just!
Elaine Paige plays a very strange cameo role (the casting in this film is a little odd to say the least).
Lots of Gothic overtones and a creaking old mansion in the country fit the stereotyped mould of the film but at least if doesn't overstay its welcome at 90 mins.
Suspend disbelief and ignore the plot holes, and the film is weirdly enjoyable.....
Quickie satisfies.
It is very strange to my mind that such a celebrated director as Raoul Ruiz is making straight-to-video movies in the UK!
However the English-language world has a goldfish memory for foreign giants and so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised.
Maybe he needs to get Spike Jonze or Quentin Tarantino to "sponsor" him ^^.
Nucingen House didn't even get a DVD release, so we shouldn't look a gift horse in the eye with this one.So we have an art critic living in a country pile who has gone blind following some nasty maiming.
He wishes to publish a final book and thus sets about hiring an "amanuensis" to assist him with this.
Tom Conti plays the role of blind critic Paul pretty well, he has just the right mix of pomposity and fragility.
The film is quite surreal, but nowhere more so perhaps than when we see a selection of self-absorbed characters interviewed for the position of amanuensis.
In this country we never really hailed the arrival of the Surrealist movement, which is perhaps strange as we are about as surreal as it gets.
So surreal that we understandably have problems rising out of the fog and making well-realised films about ourselves, although Patrick Keiller's London and Peter Greenaway's The Falls are notable successes.
Yes the UK is a nightmare of prejudice, public conformity, self-repression, snobbishness, and reverse snobbishness; all the more bizarre as it's totally unenforced.
British lives collectively are a myriad of uncorrelated banalities.
We live in post-colonial anomie.
Another example in the film is the political canvasser who is timid and petrified at the idea of engaging with someone on a non-superficial level, even if that were to be a well-to-do blind man, and even if that were, ostensibly, her mission.
Our politics are quite funny, although we have again an ostensibly socialist party in government, it's just come to light that, in effect, Tesco are able to pay to get proposed legislation torpedoed!
The amanuensis (Jane) is eventually selected and is played by Darryl Hannah.
She's fairly clearly hostile to him from the start, but is gentle enough in resting demeanour that it's clear we're seeing a vendetta from an aggrieved party, rather than the acts of a psychotic.
There's a lovely example of female passive aggressive behaviour here, which, as someone who is as pompous as they come, though with a strong twist of self-deprecation that most don't ever seem to get, I have experienced myself.
Jane sits listening to the usual enthusiastic and self-indulgent discourse, carefully choosing her moment to burst his bubble, when Paul mentions that it was always a bad thing to do for writers to drink, she coldly brings up Bukowski and Hemingway.There is camera-work here, though the movie is obviously a quickie.
The best example would be when the camera floats dreamily as we are told of Princess Diana's appearance in Bhutan.
The opening shot of the spires of the pile are suitably surreal, however the atmosphere of the very comfortable gentrified interior is in contrast to that making the opener look slightly contrived.
Being a quickie we also have a generic soundtrack over the top, which must have taken all of half an hour to select and edit in during post-production.
I doubt anything was shot twice in the movie either, hence the zoom shots when Paul takes his glasses off, which are a bit silly.For people who care about such things, the twist at the end regarding the critic himself, was pretty obvious in the first act if you are used to looking at paintings with anything other than a blank stare, or have knowledge about the meaning behind the travel itineraries of British men.Though this is a quick production, done with a minimum of fuss and cost, there's enough artistic value to make this worth a watch.
You even get to hear a good recital of the poem Jenny by James Henry Leigh Hunt..
Worth more than the current score.
I think the top review by derektrottersk says it all.
The reviews are too harsh on this movie.
It's actually an intelligent, theatrical drawing-room drama about a sophisticated but blind art critic and his quiet and beautiful amanuensis.
Each turns out to be not as they seem.
Some of the dramatic tension comes from Sir Paul's blindness, and how he and those close to him deal with it.
Some drama arises out of the scenario of a beautiful new woman living together with a difficult, handicapped old man in this grand manor house.
I thought it was well played by both Conti and Hannah.
Not a movie to be avoided..
Well written, superbly acted.
A tense, well paced mystery that delivers a superb, unexpected ending.
I felt very intellectually energized after it ended.
You think you know what it's all about and then when you're settled in your sofa you get a jolt.
The main character makes you feel a bit uneasy throughout.
Conti plays him brilliantly with understated panache and a great sense of self.
Hannah is very convincing as the soft spoken aide with a secret agenda.
As she starts to get under his skin, and yours, the story keeps you in a tight grip.
I like how the horrific creepiness is left off screen, mentioned briefly, like a lightning bolt that changes the very air particles in the room.
Never melodramatic, the story is bare, harsh, and proves the startling power of truth..
Strange but rather compelling.
I wasn't sure what to expect of this film but thought the cast list made it worth a look.
Having just finished watching it, I'm still not entirely sure whether or not I enjoyed it but it was certainly interesting and somewhat compelling.It is a thriller and there are several moments of suspense and moments where I found myself taking a sharp intake of breath, but it is certainly not particularly scary or shocking.
The best moment, for me, was the ending which, even though I realised what was going to happen, was well-executed and did make me jump.Elaine Paige is a very strange choice for one of the cameo roles and I'm not sure what prompted her casting, and (sorry if it sounds trivial) I found Daryl Hannah's "new" facial appearance rather distracting.
Tom Conti's character is rather wooden at times and, at other times, is rather moving and interesting.
Miriam Margolyes is one of my favourite actors but is given no opportunity at all to shine.All in all?
As I said in my title, strange but rather compelling.
Definitely worth watching but just don't set your expectations too high..
Not Many Thrill In This Thriller.
In the vein of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane or Misery, the movie A Closed Book deals with a woman who is mentally torturing a blind man.
Daryl Hannah is virtually unrecognizable as the (for whatever reason) unemotional person who has ulterior motives who is hired by a blind author to help him write his autobiography.
Hannah looks like a cross between Catherine O'Hare and Loretta Swit, if they were both on Lexapro on bad hair days.
Too bad she didn't revamp her role in Kill Bill: that would have been scary.
Tom Conti has a few good moments as the blind author, but his character is ultimately a confused mess, at one point highly acute to sounds and smells (even though he's only been blind for a few years), and at the next point completely helpless and stumbling over his own feet.
But the most distracting flaw in Conti's character is that he has eyes that don't even exist, with skin that has grown over the sockets like something out of a Twilight Zone episode.
Now how can we believe that?
Why not just give him empty holes or ghost white eyeballs or something else that is believable?
I was looking forward to seeing what Ellen Page had to offer to this film but to my disappointment the actress turned out to be someone named Elaine Paige.
Guess I should read the credits more closely.
We never find out what happened to the housekeeper and the ending comes out of left field as intensely as a wiffle-ball.
There was some real potential here to do some really creepy things and if they had played upon the theme of claustrophobia and the fear of the dark, they might have delivered some tense moments, but unfortunately it turned out to be an average night of off-Broadway theatre..
Intriguing film, hard to categorize.
"A Closed Book" is a rare English-language project from the extremely prolific Chilean director Raul Ruiz, and it's also one of the last films he completed before his death.
"Poirot" and "Marple" (see also "4:50 From Paddington" and "The Secret Of Chimneys") fans will feel right at home in the magnificent Knebworth House where most of this is filmed and set, and "Sleuth" or "Deathtrap" fans will appreciate the two-character format (90% of the movie is between Tom Conti and Daryl Hannah; there are only three supporting characters, two of whom have one short scene each).
This is almost a terrific film: Ruiz's use of the camera is masterful (you must be careful to notice some telling details in the background - a mirror removed, for example), the dialogue (very important in a film like this) is well-written, and the story keeps you wondering.
The main problem is that there aren't enough clues for the viewer to figure out the motivations of the characters for him/herself before they are revealed, so these revelations seem to come out of nowhere.
An intriguing film, but not for all tastes.