Closer to Hell
CLOSER
WHITE NIGHTS
DIRECTED BY LUCHINO VISCONTI
DESERTED STATION
DIRECTED BY ALIREZA RAISIAN
IS MIKE NICHOLS evil? What else would explain his going from the dismayingly unfelt HBO version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America to a chic freak show like Closer? It's a heterosexual version of what Kushner termed "venery" but without the metaphysical introspection, just Nichols' patented slickness.
Closer is adapted from a British stage play (Demons in England?), by Patrick Marber who might have conceived it to Nichols' specification. ("Write me one of them hateful Neil LaBute comedies.") It's not a love story but a cynical sex story in which two American women in London (photographer Julia Roberts and stripper Natalie Portman) cavort with two British men (writer Jude Law and doctor Clive Owen), constantly trading partners back and forth. The glamorous big-name actors confer false legitimacy on Marber's quartet of liars. Instead of examining sexual familiarity, Closer flaunts the naughtiness of infidelity (along with the British actors' sharply enunciated Anglo-Saxon epithets). The title-if pronounced ironically-refers to Nichols closing off true intimate relations. His reputation is based on making audiences feel superior to hollow characters, while applauding his cold gimmicky style.
Opening with a traffic accident that brings Law and Portman together (an Emergency Room meet-cute), Nichols makes you thank God for Mike Leigh's interest in the minutiae of realistic interaction. Closer's contrived story is structured via unnecessary time leaps, creating narrative and emotional gaps that prevent audiences from grasping details of the characters' involvements. Each scene is a confrontation, playing on the audience's guilt just like those tired-businessman plays by Neil Simon in the 60s (where Nichols made his Broadway directing rep).
Here, Nichols avoids the mundane core of soured relations; he fantasizes what tired businessmen envy as the hip immorality of today's yuppies. His cynicism actually denies intimacy (that's why there are no sex scenes, just sex talk). It turns especially fake during Portman's strip-club confrontation with Owen. Instead of a lap dance, they argue, and Nichols underscores it with the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?"-the greatest single of the 80s, but surely not on the DJ list at most strip clubs. Nichols disgraces the song's powerful quest for intimacy, pushing Johnny Marr's uncanny appropriation of Bo Biddley's chugging, anxious rhythm low in the mix. It's tainted by this insincere context.
Funny but Nichols' generation usually hides its romantic deception behind cabaret standards, as in Nora Ephron's and Woody Allen's films. It's a sign of generational condescension that here Nichols goes for cruel sentimentality. Men are shown as possessive, women as weak-even though both Roberts' and Portman's characters are sociopaths: Both their professions exploit strangers. Roberts flashes an embarrassed smile throughout her character's tramping and Portman-giving a far-less nuanced performance than in Garden State-always seems about to cry. It's LaBute made sappy. Law and Owen get the best scene-an internet porn chat set to classical music. Turning dirty words into graphics rather than sound, Nichols distracts from the homoerotic suggestiveness. Cynical but slick.
This sequence recalls Nichols' last good film, the 1971 Carnal Knowledge, which concentrated on the nature of men's sexual delusions. That film's duologues were written by satirical cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Working with the great cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, Nichols found an original style of art-movie luxe. Concentrating on his actors' faces (Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret, Rita Moreno, Cynthia O'Neal-a more impressive cast than Closer), Nichols made real cinema that unfolded Feiffer's comix artifice into palpable life. Closer's sex talk is too much of an artifice. Closing down into filmed-theater, it's an evil-minded, unerotic stiff.
BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC is offering the best contrast to Closer with its Dec. 3 revival of Luchino Visconti's rarely screened 1957 White Nights. The rich, unguarded emotions between a lonely young man (Marcello Mastroianni) and a young woman (Maria Schell) waiting for her lover to return expose Nichols' dishonesty. Closer lowers one's feelings and congratulates a jaded response. Visconti's movie elevates passion and common longing. This story of several nights' rendezvous (adapted from a Dostoyevsky short story) verifies such faith in love that the progenitor of Italian Neorealism himself gave in to almost surreal enchantment. Visconti shot entirely indoors at Cinecitta studios, creating the atmosphere of a nighttime urban plaza; it expresses the characters' dark, lonely souls while distilling modern existential experience. The legato pace produces a solemn exuberance that gives White Nights a velvety dream quality.
This time Giuseppi Rotunno shot in black and white, but it's hard to tell which scene is more ravishing. The girl's sun-lit memories? The pre-dawn snowfall? The stupefying dance in a rock 'n' roll club where the young couple seems to discover a new means of erotic expression as they hop in and out of spotlights? This last scene captures a turning point in cultural history: Visconti's ghostly images of liberation and uncertainty anticipated the 60s sexual revolution but with a still-relevant spiritual caution that Nichols doesn't bother to heed. Mastroianni and Schell, wearing glorious, puzzled smiles, are pulled toward something both splendid and ominous. The scene is worthy of "How Soon Is Now?"
REUNION IS A great subject for a modern movie; audiences need to get back in touch with what makes them human. That was the heartening theme of The Terminal. And Deserted Station, which shares that subject, could put American audiences back in touch with Iranian cinema. Interest went downhill after 9/11 but before that was the insufferable cult of personality surrounding the deliberately, increasingly obscure Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami-a figure everyone was told to hail rather than enjoy. Kiarostami had come to enforce a pedantic estheticism in his recent films, but esthetic rigor is not why Kiarostami was a great director. Excessive "rigor" is why he is not a greater director. Even I was put off by his last few films.
Deserted Station is from a Kiarostami story. The same limited tropes appear-automobile passenger-seat p.o.v., lateral pans, ineffable landscapes. But the pace here-directed by Alireza Raisian-is nimble, and people share importance with the landscape. Raisian remembers what Kiarostami forgot: He actually shoots on film rather than video. Most importantly, he provides the human touch Kiarostami abandoned. In Deserted Station, a sophisticated city couple (Nezam Manouchehri and Leila Hatami) drives through the desert on a pilgrimage and are suddenly forced to detour when their Jeep breaks down. Struggle and blessing come in an unexpected place-a tiny village hidden behind a rock formation, its men off to work or the military, its women and school children left behind. While the husband, a photographer, works on his vehicle with the male schoolteacher/mechanic, the wife substitutes in the classroom, resuming her past vocation as a teacher. From the melodramatic music score to the first zoom in to Hatami's face, Raisian frees up Kiarostami's stultifying concept and puts life on screen.
Hatami's close-up is mesmerizing. Her expressions shift from fear to sleep to dreaming-a montage of an individual's consciousness that is the damnedest thing since Catherine Zeta-Jones and Zoe Saldana in The Terminal both slid from officious to pliant to radiant. Raisian focuses on the subtle drama of people reawakening to their humanity. For Manouchehri and Hatami's characters, it's the good fortune of them finding the world in a pocket of the world (another theme shared with The Terminal). Few contemporary movies encourage viewers to get beyond themselves, but Deserted Station's commitment to exploration redefines its characters' place in the universe-not as an effete Kiarostami quandary but a passionate social fact. Hatami's interaction with the children (even correcting their assumption that "Christopher Columbus was an African woman") restores her sense of belonging.
Raisian conveys the strongest sense of the world of any movie this year. The daily village life Hatami witnesses recalls a Satyajit Ray film; it is comic, unsettling and naturally beautiful (Raisian captures a sparse flower in an old coffee can, sheep herders passing in the background). This appreciation requires that her (our) hard sophistication be broken down and sensitivity revived. It happens when she follows the kids to a train yard-the place that symbolizes their yearning to know the world. When a weak child asks, "Take me to where the trains go," Raisian reconnects a sophisticated audience to its heart. He makes you understand, like Hatami, the weight of your privilege. Sympathy and obligation become the first signs of awakening. Filmmaking like this is not evil.