I’ll admit, I’ve
been wanting to write a series like this for an exceedingly long time: I’ve
even joked about it to my friends more than once. The reason I’ve always
chickened out is because of…my prudishness. Like so many people, I can not
write comfortably about my own flaws and the very title would seem to
acknowledge the reason I watched the move in the first place.
But I recently started
writing a series about sex in movies and television. I’ve written quite a few
articles in the last year about films and TV that I found erotic but not
exploitative and where the sex was necessary about the story. Last week I wrote
about this subject in a separate column, actually confronting some of the
issues I’ve had about sex on television and how some people consider it in some
cable series as pornography and some people consider it art. Where do we draw
the line? And at a certain point, the two are not mutually exclusive.
So to be clear, even
the movies I am about to discuss involve in most cases some very explicit
nudity and sex scenes, none of
them are pornographic in the way they are defined. All of them were released in
theaters, usually with an R rating or (because some of them were foreign films
or independent released) many of them were released as unrated. However unlike
pornography, the sex and nudity I will discuss is critical to the story and
plot. I realize that for far too many
people, all sex scenes are exploitational and derivative. So I’ll be clear on
this, these articles are not for you. (Hence the title.) You want to read a
review of a Disney movie; this is your chance to click on a different article.
In the measure of full disclosure, some of these movies will discuss subjects
that may put you off just by the idea by the context of the review. That said, all of these movies have artistic
value and probably entertainment value. This is entertainment for adults, not adult
entertainment. I assume if you’ve read this far, you can parse the difference.
All right, if I
haven’t scared off most of you by now, I’m going to warn you the movie I’ve
chosen for my initial review might very well get rid of the rest of you. This
is a thirty-three year old British film that is a comedy of manners about 1980s
Britain, society and an adulterous incestuous affair. I nearly blacked out
writing those last three words, and I’m not sure how many of you will want to
stay with me going forward. Hell, I can literally see some of my followers
deciding they no longer want to read any of my articles ever again.
The thing is, I’ve
tried to be honest in so many of my columns about my feelings towards subjects
and railing against hypocrisy. I would be one myself if I did not express my
feelings. And in a way, this film influenced a lot of my life as how I viewed
certain works of art. Because one thing I’ve learned as a critic and a viewer
of film and TV is that some of the best work makes us think, even about the
subjects that makes us uncomfortable. And sex on film and TV forces us to
question this, even if we don’t want to admit it to ourselves. And we usually
don’t. That’s at least part of what this series is about.
All right, friends
and neighbors. Buckle up.
Close
My Eyes:
This
is A Romantic Comedy. Seriously
Prior to the selection
of Daniel Craig as the next James Bond, many, including Roger Ebert, believed
that Clive Owen was the best option. I find it hard to believe anyone other
than Craig could have done as brilliant a job the last fifteen years but based
on the tones of the Bond films that followed, I can understand why Owen would
have been a good candidate for the role.
At the time, most
people only knew Owen through his work on British television and a few
scattered art house films, most notably in Gosford Park. Since then, he has become one of the most
gifted actors working today, with the lion’s share of his roles being known for
his characters utter cynicism. This was clear in what would be his breakout
role in Mike Nichols’ Closer (which earned him an Oscar nomination and a
Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor) his mesmerizing turn as the bank robber
with a plan in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, and his first major leading role
in an American production the classic dystopian film Children of Men. He never played Bond, but he has played some
very interesting kind of action leads in Sin City and the hysterical
satire Shoot ‘Em Up. Similarly,
he’s had a good amount of success in television, starring the too-short lived
turn of the century medical drama The Knick, another Emmy nomination for
playing one of the titles roles in Hemingway and Gellhorn and an
interesting character role in Lisey’s Story. Personally, I thought he
may have been the best choice to play Bill Clinton in the third installment of American
Crime Story.
Almost all of the
characters he is known for playing have such a world-weariness and cynicism
about them that its fascinating that my first exposure to his work (as you’ll
see, pun is definitely intended) in Close My Eyes, which was only
his second feature film. It’s not that his performance isn’t mesmerizing; it’s
that so much of his work is done with a kind of openness and almost innocence
about the world. He looks at the world with earnestness and he seems impossible
of deception. This is supremely ironic because throughout the film, he is
engaged in an adulterous affair…with his sister.
Owen plays Richard,
the slightly younger brother of Natalie, played by Saskia Reeves. (Reeves is a
talented British actress: as with Owen, this was her second film.) We eventually
learn that early in their childhood, their parents got divorced and each parent
took a sibling with them, and they have rarely seen each other since. When we first meet them in the opening scene,
there is a clear awkwardness about them as if they really don’t know how to
talk to each other. The situation gets repeatedly odd, and one scene ends with
Natalie asking Richard for a kiss…and then kissing him back. Something she immediately
apologizes for and tries to pretend it didn’t have.
There are then a
series of short scenes taking place with subtitles telling us there are gaps of
more than a year or two between each one. In one, Natalie is about to catch a
train and they don’t talk. In another, Natalie is frantic to talk to her
brother, and is a little too unhappy when she learns he’s in the middle
of an afternoon delight. In a scene a little later, Natalie expresses
unhappiness with her job and Richard mentions something about starting over.
The bulk of the
action takes place two years later. Richard is now a somewhat successful,
almost arrogant architect. Natalie has now married a man, who based on his
initial appearance and attitude would be considered a candidate for ‘Upper Class
Twit of the Year.’ Richard ends up going to Natalie’s new husband’s country
house, where we see a lavish picnic spread being prepared. Natalie’s first words
to Richard are: “You’re unbelievably late.”
Sinclair comes
across as someone who is unctuous without meaning to be, trying to impress
Richard without being overbearing. “Do I meet with the brother’s approval?” he says
in a way that not even Richard knows how to take it. Richard says the right
things in public and then in a conversation with a colleague later, demolishes
him in private. We also learn how the two ended up meeting: Sinclair was the
boss at the next place Natalie tried to work. “She didn’t get the job, but she
got him.” There’s something a little off about the way he says that.
A few days later,
Natalie and Sinclair appear at Richard’s office. Natalie looks dressed to kill,
drops a rose on her brother’s desk and mentions that she needs to see him
privately. The next day, she does show up and the underlying tension that both
of them have been pretending isn’t there doesn’t so much erupt as explode.
Years later, when I finally
saw the trailers for this film, I saw it
advertised as something between a steamy forbidden affair and a dark drama. No
one who watches Close My Eyes can deny the former part, but I’ve watched
enough (for more reasons than the obvious) to realize that writer-director
Stephen Poliakoff may be being subversive in far more ways than one.
Take the scene where
Natalie shows up at Richard’s flat. Everything about it screams sexual tension,
but there’s just as much going on that at some point we really wonder how
seriously we should be taking this. Every time Natalie and Richard start
kissing, Natalie keeps saying: “We don’t mention it,” and offering denials,
even as she lets him kiss him. Then they sit across from each other, and they
start an inane conversation about the kind of buses that go by, which ends with
them leaping into each other’s arms, with Natalie still trying to deny what’s
happening. Even when the two of them are lying on the floor of his flat, stark
naked, Natalie alternates her kisses by saying to Richard some variation of: “You’re
going to stop me, right?” After its over and the two of them are holding each
other, Richard can only say: “And to think, we never even really liked each
other as kids.” There’s also a fair
amount of older sibling admonishment all the way through this extended scene (Natalie
asks Richard at the weirdest time how much he cleans the place) and then she
starts getting dressed by telling Richard that Sinclair wants to meet with him.
There’s also a very
large amount of comic denial going on between the siblings in the middle of all
this. At their next meeting, Natalie wants to pretend the whole thing never happened
and keeps trying to put off another rendezvous before ‘reluctantly’ giving in. We
see a separate scene where she is clearly remembering what happened and has to
go into a copy room to cool off. Then the two of them meet at Sinclair’s old
flat – both dressed to the nines – and the two of them engage in casual
conversation before Natalie says: “We’re just here to talk.” She keeps saying
that as they approach each other, and then they start tearing each other’s
clothes off (with Natalie still muttering ‘stop me over and over’)
Much of the actual
rendezvous itself bears on the nature of an actual farce. Not long after their
first roll in the sack, Sinclair’s maid shows up and Natalie manages to
convince her that everything is perfectly normal. There’s an equal amount of
childish behavior on both their parts (questioning Sinclair’s own faithfulness,
the two go to spy on them and their attitude is not so much that of reckless
lovers but as young children playing hooky) and what only can be considered the
most ridiculous amount of ignoring reality you can possibly imagine. At one
point, Natalie calls Sinclair to tell him what is gone (while Richard is
kissing her neck) and after she hangs up tells Richard: “I’d hate to have a
real affair. All that lying and deceit.” Richard at one point is amazed at
Natalie’s denial. “We’re doing something illegal…and you just seem to find it
mildly relaxing!” he says while they’re walking the promenade later that night.
It’s not like Richard isn’t similarly in denial. “The single scene is so
complicated,” he tells Natalie at one point.
It's worth noting
that both siblings are clearly besotted with each other well past this point,
but neither can see a good way to end this. Richard is clearly more naïve,
thinking there might be some way for this to go on. Natalie is more realistic
in the sense that she knows this has to end but is utterly foolish as to how.
After the rendezvous, she almost pleads that the two of them go without seeing
each other and that Richard try to date someone else for a while. This goes
over with Richard as well as you think in theory and even worse when he goes
through the motions of a very painful date.
There is also a lot
of humor to be mined from Sinclair, played by Alan Rickman in one of his very
best performances. Lost in his most famous roles as Hans Gruber and Severus
Snape is how great a comic actor he could be, which he proved most memorably in
vastly different roles in Dogma and Love, Actually. Rickman received top billing in the film (it
was just two years after Die Hard premiered) and he is a delight to
watch throughout. We spent much of the movie watching him trying to catch up
with the audience as to what is going on under his nose, and while Natalie is ‘in
a hotel’ he does catch on when the dishwasher overflow in her absence. There’s
a wonderful scene in a supermarket where he is mumbling to himself, trying to
come up with an explanation why Natalie isn’t why where’s she supposed to
be. Eventually, he does reach the conclusion
she’s an affair – and shares his suspicions with Richard. Variations on this
scene happen in nearly every movie where an adulterous affair is going on; I venture
to say that few, if any, have occurred where one of the parties has no
realistic reason to think that this man is the one his wife is sleeping with.
Poliakoff explored
variations on this theme in a stage production and one for television, but never
as directly as here. At the time, some people thought the film was a criticism
of England under Thatcher, which he never intended. I think there is a criticism
here, but its one of the nature of the intended audiences. Much of English literature
in the deals with the idea of relationships very close to this – it’s actually
called pseudo-incest. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley made it themes of their
novels, Dickens occasionally visited, and the pseudo part is all but dropped in
Jude the Obscure.. Such relationships were considered normal in literature,
mainly because of the kinds of marriages that existed among nobility and royalty
up until the early twentieth century.
There’s also the
fact, that unlike how most incestuous relationships are portrayed in fiction,
there is no real trauma to justify it. Richard actually tries to make an
argument as to why this affair could be happening and the best he can come up
with is the fact that they were raised separately. And to be clear, if Natalie was having this
affair would anybody else, it would be considered wrong but not illegal. So Poliakoff is arguing: is this kind of affair
worse than any other, really?
This kind of
question would have been unthinkable to answer in any other way in 1990. Now we
live in a world where the most popular series on TV for a decade was Game Of
Thrones. I know this world more than
I want; I’m pretty sure there have been Cersei and Jamie shippers in some form
for twenty years; I remember reading a novel where two people obsessed with the
books actually named their twin children after them and didn’t think there was
anything twisted about it. I actually raised a variation of this question in an
article about this very subject, asking why nobody had a problem with the
incest in Game of Thrones, but the idea of the possibility of a pseudo-incestuous
relationship on Dexter revolted
many. But what really was the difference, other than the fact that took place
in a fantasy world and the other took place in the contemporary one? Some people had no problem with this kind of
relationship when it took place in True Blood which did take
place in contemporary times. Is
vampire siblings having sex ok in modern America ok with audience but actual
ones having sex in contemporary Britain wrong? Where do we draw the line?
Obviously Poliakoff
could not have foreseen this movement in contemporary culture in 1990 but it
doesn’t make the concepts he raised in Close My Eyes any less relevant
to the sensibilities. It’s small wonder this movie was not a box office success
at the time or enjoys at best a middling reputation among critics and audiences;
most people don’t want to look at this subject at all, and no one wants to see
it taken in a fashion like this, as if its not a serious issue. And I don’t deny
that the fundamental relationship that the movie details is not wrong by any
standard.
What Poliakoff does –
and does very well – is make you question that standard. He knows the nature of
how these stories are supposed to be made – either as pure pornography or a
crime against nature. The movie is erotic, but that eroticism would be
considered perfectly fine if the characters Reeves and Owen played were not
related. They acknowledge it’s illegal, but Reeves also points out it’s not
hurting anyone, not even them really. There’s no trauma to explain this event,
and while you might disagree about the power dynamic, few would argue that either
Richard or Natalie don’t go into with their eyes wide open.
I should mention
that while the ending is sad, it is not tragic or end in death. Indeed, based
on the way stories like these tend to be phrased in books and movies, it’s practically
a happy ending in that sense. I think Poliakoff made the right judgment in that
sense too. If he’d ended the movie in blood and violence, it would have been
tonally all wrong to the comedy of manners he’s created all this time. Rather
it’s like the setting of so many English stories once all the revelations have
come out in to the open. There’s a part of me that wonders if maybe, somewhere
down the line, this will come down the line as just a variation on one of those
secrets that so many British families ended up keeping for decades on end. It
just happened. They won’t mention it again.
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