CLOSER 
Director: Mike Nichols.
Starring: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen.
Production: Cary Brokaw, John Calley, Robert Fox, Mike Nichols, Scott Rudin. Distribution: Columbia Tristar.
Year: 2004.
Length: 100 '.
Sfacciata, candid and provocative, the young Alice arrives in London from the United States where, to make ends meet, is a stripper in a club for men only. The eccentric foreign does not take long to get to know people in the City but the circumstances in which he meets Dan, a reporter assigned to the obituaries failed writer, or rather, they are absolutely "accidental": Alice carelessly crossing the road and is thrown to the ground by a car. The girl lost consciousness, Dan, and she helps the miraculously wakes up, bewitching the "gentle knight" with a dazzling smile. Thus begins a harrowing report that, after giving the journalist a starting point for a mediocre novel, suck in a complex emotional vortex two other characters: Anna, a successful photographer with a failed marriage behind him, and Larry, a dermatologist from the insatiable appetites sex. A
74 years and played in a film that does not hesitate to show the monstrous and indecent to even be talked about, Mike Nichols gives many young men posing with a salutary lesson maudit, proving once again that a nonconformity intended only as aesthetic attitude is nothing but a version of low-rise pants criticized bourgeois superficiality. Inspired by a senile regurgitation of irreverence, the director of The Graduate (1967) and Carnal Knowledge (1971) gathers around him a cast of high artistic value and of great commercial attraction to adapt to the demands of a successful big-screen play by Patrick Marber for the popularization of fine language that addresses the sexual problem has been translated and performed in 30 languages. The result is an interesting oxymoron film, a dark and brilliant film, chaste and pornographic, Canon's consolidated and descends, a snapshot desolate twilight of love and relationship of the couple at the dawn of the third millennium. In the background, but clearly distinguishable, the setting sun shining the pen in the Death of Freud Marber gives frequent incursions into the plot (Alice know Dan risking their lives, Dan writes obituaries. ...) In clear adherence to cliché that drama has always been linked and Eros Thanatos. That sex obey a creative instinct as opposed to the destructive death instinct theory is very well known here and is certainly not the added value of the film, to be identified but in the parallel operation director of "lining bodies" and "self-emptying of the word. " Language, caste and brutal images: the product, not at all obvious, is a shameless denudation of the soul, pushed further and developed the character already established interpretations offered by both Julia Roberts and Judd Law that by Clive Owen and Natalie Portman emerging. Interpersonal relations are therefore regulated by the gaming and non-frivolous said of the fascination that leads the individual to a primitive egoism that true love should be demolished instead. The sex instinct is the voltage that attracts and repels people, holds together the social system. The man remains at the bottom of an animal whose work is focused on satisfying the needs and Nichols, who in His long filmography also boasts a werewolf version of Jack Nicholson (Wolf - The beast is out, 1994),'ll remember sketching a description of an incipient post-romantic and it was squalid. Closer
If the bet wins to reach the artistic finesse through the ELP vulgarity is not so exclusive thanks to the dialogues. Weigh the contents, and weighs weighs the melancholic atmosphere above the elegance of a narrative warp as a continuous flow in which the invisible seams of time shifts tell cucendone three reports together the beginning and end. All in imitation of the unconscious mechanisms of the psyche that, according to Nichols, would tend to remember the love stories of the past "only the beginning and end, while eliminating the ". Exactly, we might say, what the weather, for revenge with human beings, reducing them to go through a miserable two dates carved on a marble slab. As if to say that the best, life and love, is doomed to oblivion.
review of Alessandro Montanari
February 13, 2007 
