Like most interesting movies about sex, Closer, Mike Nichols's deft film adaptation of a well-known play by Patrick Marber, is mostly talk. There are still a few filmmakers -- not all of them French -- who are capable of infusing the bodily expressions of erotic desire with dramatic force and psychological meaning, but the vast majority are content with a few moments of sheet-twisting and peek-a-boo montage.
In the past, Nichols has usually addressed sexuality with an elegant mixture of candor and discretion, and his intention in Closer, which brings him back to the raw, needy emotions of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Carnal Knowledge, seems to show very little while saying a great deal.
There is some display of skin: one of the characters, after all, is a stripper -- another happens to be a dermatologist -- and a pivotal scene unfolds in her place of work. But even that moment is less memorable for Natalie Portman's near-nudity than for the emotional self-exposure of the fully-clothed Clive Owen.
The verbal intercourse that dominates that scene and every other in the film is vigorous, compulsive, sometimes painful and occasionally funny, as well as more stimulating -- for the characters, one suspects, as much as the audience -- than the physical intercourse that is its frequent subject.
It is also mannered, schematic and frequently improbable, defects in Marber's play that Nichols and his strenuously engaged cast labor mightily to overcome.
Although Closer moves gracefully through the streets and rooms of contemporary London, it never quite shakes off the stasis and claustrophobia that haunt even the best screen adaptations of self-conscious, over-reaching serious drama. At times, the smooth naturalism of Nichols's direction emphasizes the archness and artificiality of Marber's dialogue and the unreality of the people speaking it.
Nonetheless, those people, though they are increasingly difficult to like, do manage to command a degree of curious attention.
There are four of them, free-floating representatives of the disconnected contemporary tribe of wandering city-dwellers, arranged by Marber (who wrote the screenplay) and Nichols into a tight, ever-shifting grid of jealousy, longing and deceit.
The opening sequence is a barbed variation on the romantic comedy cliche of "meeting cute." Portman, playing Alice, a transplanted American, ambles along a crowded sidewalk. Walking toward her is Jude Law, whose character, Dan, is a newspaper obituary writer with literary aspirations.
Their eyes lock across an intersection, into which Alice steps -- looking, as Americans will in London, in the wrong direction. The taxicab that knocks her down is a hulking metaphor for the narrative that follows, in which Alice and Dan -- along with Larry (Owen) and Anna (Julia Roberts), whose own cute meeting via mistaken identity and the Internet soon follows -- collide by accident, continually blindsided by one another and by their own feelings.
Nichols cleverly communicates their disequilibrium by detaching their stories from the usual chronological guideposts. Sometimes the cut from one scene to the next will leap across months or even years, and rather than signal the jump with words on the screen, the film keeps us guessing about how much time has passed until a line of dialogue supplies a clue. A great deal of significant action takes place off screen in those temporal gaps, and what we are witnessing are premonitions and repercussions -- the flirting that precedes and the fighting that follows.
One effect of this dislocation is to endow a very simple story with a feeling of complication and surprise. Unlike most movie love stories, Closer does have the virtue of unpredictability. The problem is that while parts are provocative and forceful, the film as a whole collapses into a welter of misplaced intensity.
Larry, Dan, Alice and Anna seem to find themselves in a constant state of emotional extremity, in part because the quiet, everyday moments of their lives have been pruned away, but for precisely that reason their tears and rants seem arbitrary and a little absurd.
They are four characters in search of an objective correlative, their intimacies obstructed by lofty words -- honesty, cowardice, love -- that seem, after a while, to mean nothing at all. When the two official couples, their relationships threatened by symmetrical unofficial coupling, reach their climactic confrontations, it's hard not to wonder, "What on earth are they so worked up about?"
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not