Closer

This text contains some spoilers, so please don't read this if you haven't seen the film yet!

I saw the film "Closer" this week. I was always going to like this film. After all, it has Natalie Portman in it. Not only is she in it, her character is, in part, a stripper. Ooohlala. As the character Larry says in the film, when asked by Anna "Why is the sex so important to you?". Because I'm a fucking caveman.

However, I like this film for much more than that. I like it because it says things about the melancholic nature of relationships that I understand only too well.

The production notes contain this quote from the director Mike Nichols:

"Closer concerns itself with the fact that, in love, we remember beginnings and endings and tend to edit out the middles. It asks interesting questions like 'how do we really remember things and how does life really look to us?'"

Of course, in my case, the beginnings, middles and ends are so far back in time as to be telescoped together in any case. But that aside, he does have a point.

A lot of the film deals with the question of truth and lies; honesty and deceit. Do we really want to know the truth? Are we sometimes better off not knowing the bald truth? Good questions but as in life no good answers. Larry and Anna end up together, but are they really happy? Dan and Alice explode apart, in part because of his need to know the hard truth about Alice's relationship with Larry.

I muse that there wasn't a lot of deceit in the relationship that still haunts me. Certainly not about the small things - I never caught her in a lie. I was surely deceived about the question of whether she was the one for me but that was, I think, self-inflicted. Anyway, enough of these self-indulgent musings...

The sound track by Damien Rice is excellent, particularly the song that opens the film and that the credits play out to - "The Blowers' Daughter".