Closer · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A green cursor blinks in a dark room. Jude Law's Dan—an obituary writer with a stalled novel—is typing filth to a stranger in a chat room, and he's typing it as a woman. He has borrowed the name Anna. At the other end, Clive Owen's Larry believes every word and arranges to meet "her" at an aquarium the next afternoon. A lie told entirely in language summons a real body to a real place. Two people will couple, marry, and ruin each other partly because of a sentence neither of them meant.

That scene is the whole of Closer in miniature, and it's where Deleuze stops being a luxury and becomes a tool. The older idea of cinema—André Bazin's, roughly—was that the camera testifies. The world deposits itself on the film; the image doesn't lie. Deleuze gave a name to the cinema that walks away from that contract and makes invention its engine: the powers of the false (puissances du faux). Here truth and falsehood stop being a verdict the film delivers and become the thing the characters wield on each other. The governing scene in Marber's script is the confession: one partner demands the truth, the other supplies it, and the truth, freely given, doesn't free anyone. It wounds. That's the film's discovery, and it inverts the realist faith completely. The lie in the chat room created something; the truths in the bedrooms only destroy.

Deleuze had a figure for the person who lives this way: the forger (le faussaire), the protagonist who doesn't seek truth but fabricates it, whose identity is serial and shifting—he drew it from Welles's F for Fake. Closer is a film of forgers. Dan forges Anna at the keyboard. And Alice—Natalie Portman's stripper, guarded behind a performance—turns out to have forged herself; the late reversal recasts the name and the biography we've trusted for two hours as an invention. The most honest character is the best liar. Notice what this does: it pulls the rug from the confession ritual the men keep performing. They keep extracting "the truth" as if it were a fixed object buried in the other person. There is no such object. There's only the next version.

Watch how Mike Nichols and his cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt shoot the faces while this happens. The camera holds, and holds, on a face in cold, even, unflattering light—gallery whites, hospital fluorescents, rooms that give nobody anywhere to hide. This is Deleuze's affection-image: the close-up as a feeling caught at the threshold, registered but not yet spent in action. Normally that feeling discharges—the wounded lover acts, leaves, strikes, fixes something. In Closer it can't. Perception of betrayal arrives, and the only thing available is more talk. The sensory-motor circuit that drives ordinary movies—see a situation, act to change it—is jammed here on purpose. They perceive everything and can alter nothing, so they interrogate. The face becomes the entire battleground, which is why the film is built out of close-range two-shots and lets them run.

The strip-club scene is the cruelest demonstration. Larry pays Alice for answers, and what he buys is words that compose a picture of intimacy and then stand in for the woman he can't actually reach. Deleuze called this a crystalline description: an image or speech that builds its own object and replaces it, so you can no longer get behind the description to a real thing. He demands her real name; money buys language but not the referent. The booth, the transaction, the postures—Nichols stages it as what Deleuze named a gest, a bodily attitude that lays bare a social and theatrical relation. The set piece is the film's thesis worn on the body: possession dressed as honesty.

And the cutting recruits us into the lie. John Bloom's editing drops us into scenes after the relationship has already changed, withholding the connective tissue, leaping months and then years with almost no signpost; a line of dialogue reveals, mid-scene, that an affair began or ended while we weren't looking. This makes the viewer the third of Deleuze's relation-image—the one who holds the relations the film refuses to show, reconstructing the off-screen betrayals from the residue on the faces. We are made complicit in the inference, which is to say in the suspicion.

None of this is formal revolution, and it would be slop to pretend otherwise. Closer is a late chamber drama, and its lineage is its honesty: Nichols filming Marber the way he filmed Albee in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, keeping the playwright's language intact and trusting escalation over "opening it up"; the year-skipping recrimination of his own Carnal Knowledge; the ellipsis-as-grammar of Pinter's Betrayal, where a cut's charge depends on what it withholds; the partner-swapping roundelay of La Ronde; the held, coverage-refusing two-shots of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. What Nichols adds, and what makes the Deleuzian lens earn its place, is the marriage of that stagecraft to the false: he uses a clinical, exposing camera not to deliver truth but to watch truth fail as a weapon. The achievement is compression. He takes the apparatus of realism—plain light, patient faces, real time on the actors—and turns it against realism's promise.

So the question the film hands back isn't "who lied?" It's worse. If the only thing that ever created anything between these four was a fabrication typed in the dark, what exactly were they demanding when they demanded the truth? Watch it again for the faces in the moment the truth lands. Nothing is freed. Something closes.