On Paramount+ Closer, romantic drama based on the play of the same name Patrick Marber. Director Mike Nicholsdirector of the New Hollywood masterpiece that he is Bachelormovie stars Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman AND Clive Owen. Produced by Columbia Pictures and Scott Rudin, it was nominated for the 2005 Academy Awards in the Best Supporting Actor and Actress category for its portrayals of Owen and Portman.
TRAILER – Closer
Eternal Return
Job Nichols undoubtedly represents one of the best transitions from the stage of theatrical fiction to the big screen. Closer opens among the crowds of London, while Portman and Law’s two characters, Dan and Alice respectively, meet as two soul mates for whom love at first sight always applies. And this is music extra-diegetic belonging Damien Rice, Blower’s Daughter, central to the opening and closing of the film, which highlights the romantic tragedy of the two characters, as well as Roberts and Owen, aka Larry and Anna. Story Closer it is the plot that follows the final narrative, a change of faces and partners for each of the four characters.
The movie has three acts that figuratively divide the story; in the theater they are divided into the transition from one mood or turn to another, which in cinema we call the end of an episode or the connection of one scene to another. What makes the film so special is how Nichols chooses to stick to the theatrical form and composition of the original work. Anna, Dan, Larry and Alice are four characters who search for the truth of love and struggle with it. They struggle to find her, and when they look for her, Nichols immediately shares these role reversals.. Emphasizing the fragility of a romantic feeling, instinctive, crazy, toxic, without brakes, a spare wheel and the search for love happiness.
To paraphrase Pirandello, Closer There are four characters looking for love. Fickle individuals who need shelter in order to love. Feeling useful to define yourself in a relationship. On this basis, Nichols and Marber develop the eternal return of Dan, Larry, Alice and Anna. This is a ping pong table Closer. Where a writer of beautiful and lost hopes, an indecisive photographer, a rude dermatologist and a stripper lost in the world jump from one side to the other. I try, search, leave and recover. They put their obsessions above the real meaning of the term “love.”
Romantic heroes: cunning, aggressive and balanced.
In this quadrilateral of love, the two male personalities are the obverse of the same coin. Toxic, bordering on the manifestation of psychological submission. Despair in the face of loss of love is identified with the fear of ceasing to be the center of the quadrangle. Larry from Clive Owen it’s crass, crass, overly patriarchal and at times misogynistic. While Dan Jude Law he is egocentric by definition. The company’s decisions depend on the latter Roberts and labor Portman. It is dictated by painful jealousy, an aggravated possibility of not getting what you want, namely Anna. Allowing himself to be consumed by anger to the point of simulating sex while chatting with an unsuspecting Larry is the engine that sets off the acquaintance between them and Roberts’ character.
Both are separated by the loss of the object of their desire, and so they exchange depression and human suffering. We are making little changes in course regarding Anna. Closer this is pure theater applied to cinema. We notice this in the way Nichols abruptly changes scenes in time, which has the function of curtain and non-curtain in the life of the quadrangle. And in a time shift the director Bachelor he knows how to create a cinematic story that gravitates towards a thriller, although it is not one. That is, seeking to transform the tragic plot into a romantic genre that, hesitantly, is always ready to change perspective and aesthetic direction.
Alice and Anna, woman’s portrait
If male characteristics are the result of a toxic masterful objectification of what they feel, Alice and Anna are a sign of the abstractness of their “I love you.” It is no coincidence that Marber only revisits his original work in Alice. Cause the death of the person who gets to the real Jane. Free to love only when she is finally free of this quadrilateral and Dan’s obsession/obsession. Anna, on the other hand, is a portrait of an insecure yet manipulative woman in her attachment to the materialism of her two partners. , Larry and Dan. Well presented in Roberts’ interpretation. An indefinably romantic and outspoken femme fatale, who in turn makes sex the key to the physical and emotional state Owen and Law are going through.
Truth at any cost
Quadrangle CloserQuote Ingmar Bergmanchasing a desperate and painful dream. To be and not to seem. Transported toto love and not pretend that you love. Anna, Dan, Larry and Alice/Jane are directed towards the form of truth they have been striving for since the beginning of their quadrangle. The Nichols/Marber duo’s dark search for the truth and what happened serves not only to enliven the animating structure of romantic myth, but also to give meaning to the materiality of love. The latter is understood as the violence of emotions in competition, the purpose of which is to explore fairness as a mechanism of analysis. The bonds were centered on sex and the reaction of truth as a response to carnal desire.
All four main characters know deep down that they have been betrayed, of course, alternately, but they want to hear it in person. To confront themselves with the unshakable truth and understand how much they are willing to overlook or give up. And here too there is a different measure. On the one side Anna, Larry AND Dan they are willing to overcome the truth by allowing this toxic and obsessive form of love to dominate. With another AliceHaving finally rejected Dan, he restores his romantic morality. Let us put an end to the ambiguity of the repeated monomyth of the quadrangle. The choice to escape the cage to your true identity. Correcting yourself.
Closer Almost twenty years after its release, it witnessed one of the best love stories on the big screen. Dysfunctional, like a novel by Ernest Hemingway, tragic, like a work by William Shakespeare. Demonstrating in its fragmented quadrangle the repetition of love and its search for truth.