Love, sex and relationships in CLOSER.
“What’s so great about the truth? Try lying for a change – it’s the currency of the world.”, says Dan, Jude Law, revealing one of the messages that is explored throughout the film, Closer, between lies and truth - between revealed and hidden feelings.
The film offers a redefinition of the conventional representation of sexuality and romantic affairs in mainstream cinema, where sex assumes an exclusive prominent position, and feelings are as volatile as the passing wind. They come, tear everything apart, and are gone without any hint of explanation; and the person that once filled someone’s life with joy and desire, becomes someone to be avoided, forgotten and if preferably to never find us again. Moreover, the film breaks away from the traditional filmic notions of romance, love and happiness by suggesting, through one of Larry’s, Clive Owen, lines – being this even more relevant by the fact that he is the only character in the film that gets what he wants – that not everybody wants to be happy, referring to his wife Anna, Julia Roberts, - “Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live.”
However, the characters don’t see themselves from this perspective, since they are all obsessed with their quest for true happiness and true love. This however is never achieved because, they truly don’t know what they want, or else are permanently changing their minds and hearts about it.
At mid way through the film I thought that Alice, Natalie Portman, the main protagonist, was the exception to this uncertainty and constantly changing feelings. She is the only character that right until the climax scene has been consistent and faithful to her feelings for Dan. She is the only character from whom one could eventually conceive an ever-lasting love, due to it’s proven endurance throughout the film: resisting time spent together, betrayal, and time spent apart. However, the spectator is, together with Dan, struck with immense brutality when Alice, unexplainably reveals that she has stopped loving Dan, and that he should leave immediately, giving as only explanation the fact that she suddenly realised that there was no love between them: “Where is this "love"? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words.”
Love is then represented as both volatile and extremely fragile, while sex is treated as a key and determinant element in a relation, as it is seen with Larry and Anna, that were apart but following a blackmailed sexual intercourse, rediscover a new path in their relationship, mainly from Anna’s point of view.
Returning to the issue of whether people truly want to be happy or not, I think that Closer supports the view that people don’t want to be happy, or better, don’t want to conform to the happiness that is offered to them. In other words, the characters of the film seem to desperately strive, almost animalistically and in the brink 'death', for the love of the person with whom they are in love, at a certain point in the film. However, when they finally manage to attract their loved one’s love back, the enchantment is broken and they lose interest in who once was the object of breathtaking desire. That person ceases to represent a challenge, and they quickly undergo a new search, a new adventure, a new desperation and reason for suffering. This suggests the existence of an unconscious desire for platonic love and consequent suffering, as it may be illustrated by this verse from a song: “Cause there’s beauty in the breakdown”.*
I read somewhere about the film that it was ‘Hollywood getting real’. And the question that I arouse is: does this representation of relationships and love affairs reflect the truth that we live in our society? and thus, can it represent a trend that will now become more and more significant in Hollywood cinema?
* “Let Go” in the album Details, by Frou Frou.
The film offers a redefinition of the conventional representation of sexuality and romantic affairs in mainstream cinema, where sex assumes an exclusive prominent position, and feelings are as volatile as the passing wind. They come, tear everything apart, and are gone without any hint of explanation; and the person that once filled someone’s life with joy and desire, becomes someone to be avoided, forgotten and if preferably to never find us again. Moreover, the film breaks away from the traditional filmic notions of romance, love and happiness by suggesting, through one of Larry’s, Clive Owen, lines – being this even more relevant by the fact that he is the only character in the film that gets what he wants – that not everybody wants to be happy, referring to his wife Anna, Julia Roberts, - “Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live.”
However, the characters don’t see themselves from this perspective, since they are all obsessed with their quest for true happiness and true love. This however is never achieved because, they truly don’t know what they want, or else are permanently changing their minds and hearts about it.
At mid way through the film I thought that Alice, Natalie Portman, the main protagonist, was the exception to this uncertainty and constantly changing feelings. She is the only character that right until the climax scene has been consistent and faithful to her feelings for Dan. She is the only character from whom one could eventually conceive an ever-lasting love, due to it’s proven endurance throughout the film: resisting time spent together, betrayal, and time spent apart. However, the spectator is, together with Dan, struck with immense brutality when Alice, unexplainably reveals that she has stopped loving Dan, and that he should leave immediately, giving as only explanation the fact that she suddenly realised that there was no love between them: “Where is this "love"? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words.”
Love is then represented as both volatile and extremely fragile, while sex is treated as a key and determinant element in a relation, as it is seen with Larry and Anna, that were apart but following a blackmailed sexual intercourse, rediscover a new path in their relationship, mainly from Anna’s point of view.
Returning to the issue of whether people truly want to be happy or not, I think that Closer supports the view that people don’t want to be happy, or better, don’t want to conform to the happiness that is offered to them. In other words, the characters of the film seem to desperately strive, almost animalistically and in the brink 'death', for the love of the person with whom they are in love, at a certain point in the film. However, when they finally manage to attract their loved one’s love back, the enchantment is broken and they lose interest in who once was the object of breathtaking desire. That person ceases to represent a challenge, and they quickly undergo a new search, a new adventure, a new desperation and reason for suffering. This suggests the existence of an unconscious desire for platonic love and consequent suffering, as it may be illustrated by this verse from a song: “Cause there’s beauty in the breakdown”.*
I read somewhere about the film that it was ‘Hollywood getting real’. And the question that I arouse is: does this representation of relationships and love affairs reflect the truth that we live in our society? and thus, can it represent a trend that will now become more and more significant in Hollywood cinema?
* “Let Go” in the album Details, by Frou Frou.
2 Comments:
Persas,
I’m sorry for my bad English writing, but I’m rusty on it. Let’s hope you understand at least some… where’s my contribution:
As you may well know, I don’t understand nothing about filmmaking or the technical aspects of making one, but I can give you my standpoint as a spectator.
I saw this movie a couple of days ago, and I found Natalie Portman… I’m sorry… I found the movie very good. I’m not one of Julia Roberts’s biggest fans, but even her does surprisingly well in this film – though I think she has the worst performance of the four actors. Not that she sucked (as usual…), just that the others were excelling, especially Natalie Portman and Clive Owen (I think he was just nominated for the Oscars with this role).
It’s interesting to see a Hollywood film how talks about sex without ever showing one scene of explicit sex. It’s good for a change. It’s even more accomplished, if you think that it’s much harder and raw when you are able to say a great deal while showing very little. Well there’s some nudity, after all, one of the characters is a stripper 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.
I think that the script and the dialogues are a must see in this movie as long as the actors. It feels like every sentence of the characters mean something for the story and is important in the plot. The verbal intercourse is vigorous, compulsive, sometimes (meaning a LOT…) 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.
I’m surprised it came out of Hollywood.
I liked the fact that the movie started and finished with the same music (left the cinema humming - it’s an earworm that song!) but in contrasting situations: in the beginning, two perfect strangers meet each other accidentally (quite literally!) and in the end of the movie, it’s the other couple (who also met accidentally) who gets to stay together.
Also liked the “solution” the Director found for the usual chronological guideposts. There aren’t… Sometimes the cut will leap across months or even years keeping you guessing about how much time has really passed until a dialogue gives you a hint. A great deal of significant action takes place in these hiatus. Perhaps he was making an analogy with the disequilibrium of the characters?
(…) does this representation of relationships and love affairs reflect the truth that we live in our society?
Well, it’s a movie. It may happen sometimes, occasionally, it may be a stereotyped story… but it surely doesn’t represent the majority of our society, at least as I know it. Larry, Dan, Alice and Anna seem to find themselves in a constant state of tension and emotional extremity, off course; because all their quiet everyday moments were wiped out… but because of this, you may think that their tears and burst outs are arbitrary and even absurd. You may get to that point where you say: “What’s the problem with them? Why are they so worked up about?”
On the other hand it’s also real in the sense that the bad guy (is he?), Larry (C. Owen), gets the girl. As you said he’s the only one that ends up the way he wanted, assuming that Anna (J. Roberts) is depressed and that she only wants to be unhappy to confirm that she is depressed…and that living can be depressing.
(…) can it represent a trend that will now become more and more significant in Hollywood cinema?
I think that’s mostly a question of how much success (meaning money) this movie gets. If it does well, you can be sure that you’ll see 100 more like it (I think it wasn’t nominated for the Oscars so that’s a turndown).
Other thing, wich may be a “shot in the foot”: average people aren’t really concerned in a complicated story of betrayal, love and redemption. Closer does have all those things, but it lacks that good old fashioned celebrity nudity and may suffer for it in the box office.
Shortening, here’s how the movie works: there’s this guy, Dan, who meets this girl, Alice, one day and hit it off. Dan meets Anna, one day and hit it off, while Anna meets Larry, one day and hit it off… off course Larry wouldn’t mind to hit off with Alice… It’s a bit schizophrenic, but that’s what you get when you take up emotions as something with no value.
(…)
Come to think about it… the movie isn’t about love, betrayal, relationships or whatever, it’s about pain. That’s it! The whole movie is just a game in which the winner is the one who causes the most amount of pain to the others. Larry won.
I have this friend that has this theory about love, relationships and life in general. Don’t know if you ever heard it! It’s an analogy that goes as follows: We are all driving a car trough an highway (which is life…) and we are running out of gas and see a sign saying GAS STATION: NEXT EXIT. Now you have two choices: you exit or keep on driving. If you exit and pump, then, that’s it, you may think of what may have happened if you kept on driving but you’ll never know. If you made the riskier choice – didn’t stop – then you can get run out of gas and stuck in the berm of the road, or, be lucky and get to the next gas station sign, having the same dilemma all over again. It’s a bit daft and naïf, but the idea is quite accurate… we’re never satisfied, we want something in life and when we finally get it, then it just doesn’t seems has good as you thought it was in the beginning.
Have you seen “The Machinist” with Christian Bale (the kid from “Empire of the Sun”)? Maybe you can write something about that.
Best regards and wishes in whatever you’re doing.
Keep in touch
João Pedro P. Luzio
PS. I’ll try to take some time from my “busy schedule”, and, see if you have something new in this blog of yours now and then.
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