Closer

Closer is one of the best films I have seen to date ...
Perhaps it has a strange familiarity of a stage play - and rightly so considering it was adapted from a dramatic script.

But what captivated me most, and left me pondering for the entire night - no it wasn't about the sex - but the paradox and complexity of relationships in modernity (or should we say post modernity). It's the use and abuse; the demise of happiness, the perplexity of the human condition in a world that has lost its way. It's the unabashed and tenacious honesty of the film and the portrayal of relations that held my unabated breath.

It was, in the end, something we could all identify with - loneliness and alienation; a sufferance of ennui and the condition of ostranenie. That was, to me, the 'base' of the film; the heart of the entangled complexity of love, hate, possession and desire that was the super-text of the film.

In a world that is characterised by loneliness, we no longer can tell if we truly love someone or if it is, eventually, about a carnal attraction. We no longer know if we should sacrifice happiness for stability; we no longer know what happiness is since we are largely a depressive specie. We no longer even know who we are loving or what those exclamations of love mean - the sign is indeed dislocated; the signifier and the signified have divested.

The words spoken powerfully by the characters in the film still linger in my mind ...