Closer
January 12th, 2006
a review of an excellent movie i watched the other day.
Closer
starring : Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen
the moment the movie started, The Blower’s Daughter by Damien Rice played, and i instantly fell in love with the movie even before it began.
it’s a story of 4 strangers who meet and collide into each other’s lives in the strangest ways — Dan, an aspiring novelist, meets Alice Ayres, a free spirit who escaped from New York to London on a whim. she gets hit by a cab because she looked the wrong way before she crossed, and he rushes her to the hospital in his arms. they immediately hit it off — he’s so enraptured by her zest and she just needs someone to need her.
some time later, Dan writes a novel that is to be published soon, and he is sent to Anna, who will photograph him for his novel jacket. he falls for her instantly, and for a few moments she reciprocates but sound-mindedness holds her back. on the same day, Anna is introduced to Alice who is now Dan’s girlfriend, and she photographs Alice in a very sad and jarring moment when she is crying — and this photograph later makes it’s way into Anna’s portfolio of Portraits of Strangers.
in a sex chatroom, Dan comes across a physician named Larry who just wants some quick cyber fun. Dan masquerades as a girl, and they both partake in a raunchy e-discourse which ends with Dan asking Larry to meet him at the London Aquarium so that they may adjourn to a hotel later. Larry agrees, but as chance would have it, he bumps into Anna at the aquarium, thinking that she’s the hot woman he was scoring with over the internet. she politely tells him no, she does not wank to horny strangers nor plead with them to wear her wet knickers. he’s embarassed, but they go out for a stroll anyway. they hit it off, and ta da, fall in love.
a year later, Anna has an exhibition for her Portraits of Strangers — one of those classy artsy things attended by the beautiful people who want to see beautiful art. Dan comes with Alice, and is devastated to find that Anna is now attached. in front of a huge blow-up of her own photo, Alice stands alone smoking a cig until Larry approaches her and asks her what she thinks of her own portrait. they converse briefly, and then Alice leaves.
so our 2 heroes and 2 heroines now make up a most peculiar crossroad. we are fast-forwarded to a year later where Anna is now married to Larry, and Dan is longing to break free from Alice who despite all her sweetness is terribly clingy. in a quiet confession from Anna to Larry, we find out that she and Dan have been having an affair all this while. across town, Dan is telling Alice the same thing. Larry bursts into a fit of anger and demands from Anna all the sordid details of her secret sex life, whereas Alice pulls a ‘you cant leave me, because i’m leaving you first’, runs out the door, and vanishes from Dan’s life.
a few months later, Larry bumps into Alice who is now a stripper. they go into a room where she performs for him, and out of the blue and totally randomly, he tells her he loves her. she behaves tantalizingly coy, just like when they first met in front of her portrait at the exhibition a year ago. a bitter man now, he scorns her vulgar occupation — snarling that strippers adopt stage-names to hide their shame, to pretend to be someone else. mocking her, he asks her repeatedly for her real name while throwing cash at her each time, to which she insists over and over again that her name is ‘plain Jane Jones’.
fast forward some more, and we are brought to a moment where Larry arranges a meeting with Anna to tell her that he will only sign the divorce papers if she has sex with him one last time. she reluctantly agrees, but only if he promises to leave her and Dan alone after that. they do the deed — and later on Dan, in an epiphanic moment, smells this on her and throws a fit. they argue, and Dan accuses Anna of being a coward cos she succumbed to Larry’s threat.
another jump — Larry and a desperate Dan face-off in Larry’s office. Anna has apparently left Dan to go back to Larry, and Larry is now behaving like an extremely arrogant cat who ate the canary. Dan is distraught, frantic, and begs for Larry to give Anna back to him. Larry instead prescribes him the address of the nightclub that Alice works at, and tells him to go look for her. Larry’s last words to Dan are, ‘I fucked Alice’.. and on that note, Dan leaves to look for her.
we find out that a year later, Larry and Anna are very comfortably settled in their marriage without Dan or Alice to intrude. somewhere far away, Dan and Alice are in a hotel room, cuddling and horsing around, until their conversation arrives on the topic of Anna and Larry. things turn sour when Dan demands to know if Alice ever had sex with Larry, even though he already knows the truth. she lies and says no, afraid he wouldnt forgive her, but he calls her bluff. they argue, and their screaming is almost congruent to the fight between Larry and Anna when he wanted to know the details of her sex life with Dan. upon provocation from Alice, Dan slaps Alice hard across the face .. and the movie ends with Alice flying back to New York alone. there, to airport security she flashes her passport, the one she would never show Dan, and on it, we see that her name is Jane Rachel Jones.
this movie is amazing in so many ways. it addresses human desires and the love we are always searching for, not directly but in the form of strangers, who are all possibilities and paths we have yet to cross. “try lying for a change, it’s the currency of the world”, a line brilliantly executed by Dan reminds us all how today we dive into our relationships all full of lies. all the infidelity going on in the movie further serves to underscore that. truth in a relationship is almost sparse and when it does appear it only serves to hurt both parties. the only time anyone is ever honest by choice in the movie is when Alice tells Larry her real name is Jane Jones, only ironically he does not believe her.
where is the truth? Dan, a writer, turns the worst of people into angels with the use of his magnificent euphemisms in their orbituaries. Anna, a photographer, captures sad people crying in melancholic moments only to turn it into something that’s ‘art’, so beautiful to the eye but we never really recognize the sadness behind the beauty. Larry, a dermatologist, only concerned with repairing everything on the surface and leaving everything beneath it damaged just so long as the veneer is fine. Alice, a stripper, who never tells lies but lives a lie, reveals her true self only when she is stripped down to the bone in front of strangers.
when we run away from things and from people we love, is there ever a need for a facade? why are we who we are only when we’re not part of someone else?
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