CLOSER

This is a movie about all the issues a relationship can bring up to the open. It´s also a well structured plot on treason and infidelity, and about the difference between passion, love and the necessary equilibrium each one needs to take into a relationship, in order to make it workable.

Closer is a 2004 American romantic drama film written by Patrick Marber, based on his award-winning 1997 play of the same name. The film was produced and directed by Mike Nichols and stars Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen. The film, like the play on which it is based, has been seen by some as a modern and tragic version of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, with references to the opera in both the plot and the soundtrack. Owen starred in the play as Dan, the role played by Law in the film.

The film was recognized with a number of awards and nominations, including Oscar nominations and Golden Globe wins for both Portman and Owen for their performances in supporting roles.

A beautiful young woman (Natalie Portman) and Dan Woolf (Jude Law) see each other for the first time from opposite sides of a street as they are walking toward each other, among many other rush-hour pedestrians. She is a young American who just arrived in London, and Dan is an unsuccessful British writer who is on his way to work, where he writes obituaries for a newspaper. Not used to the direction of the traffic, she looks the wrong way as she crosses the street and is hit by a taxi cab right in front of Dan. After he rushes to her side, she smiles at him and says: "Hello, stranger."

He takes her to the hospital, where she is treated and released. Afterward, on the way to his office, they stop by Postman's Park, the same park that he and his father visited after his mother's death. Pausing in front of the office before going to work and leaving her, Dan reminds her that traffic in England tends to come on from the right. On impulse, he asks her name, which she gives as Alice Ayres. They soon become lovers.

A year later, Dan has written a novel based on Alice's life. While being photographed to publicize it, he flirts with the American photographer Anna Cameron (Julia Roberts). Anna shares a kiss with Dan before finding out that Dan and Alice are in a relationship. Alice arrives and uses Anna's bathroom, leaving Anna and Dan alone again. Dan takes the chance to try to persuade Anna to have an affair with him but is cut short by Alice's return. Alice asks Anna if she can have her portrait taken as well.

Anna agrees, and Alice asks Dan to leave them alone during the photo shoot. While being photographed, she reveals to Anna that she overheard them, and she is photographed while crying. Alice doesn't tell Dan what she heard, and Dan spends a year brooding over his interest in Anna.

Another year later, Dan enters a cybersex chat room and randomly meets Larry Gray (Clive Owen), a British dermatologist. With Anna still on his mind, Dan pretends to be her, and using the pretense that they will be having sex, Dan invites Larry to meet at the aquarium, where Anna told Dan she often went. Larry goes to the rendezvous, where he by chance meets Anna, and learns that he is the victim of a prank. Anna tells Larry that a man who had pursued her, Dan, was most likely to blame for the setup. Soon, Anna and Larry become a couple, and they refer to Dan as "Cupid" from then on.

Four months later, at Anna's photo exhibition, Larry meets Alice, whom he recognizes from a photograph of her in tears that is being exhibited. Larry knows that Alice and Dan are a couple from talking to Anna. Dan persuades Anna to become involved with him. They cheat on their respective lovers for a year, even though Anna and Larry marry halfway through the year. Eventually Anna and Dan each confess the affair to their respective partners, leaving their relationships for one another.

Alice becomes a stripper, heartbroken by her loss. One day, Larry runs into her accidentally at the strip club. He repeatedly asks her real name, but no matter how much money he gives her, she keeps telling him her name is Jane Jones. He asks her to have sex with him, but she refuses.

Later, Larry and Anna meet for coffee. She asks him to sign their divorce papers, and he bargains with her—she agrees to sleep with him so that he will sign the documents and thereafter leave her alone. Anna and Dan meet the same day at the opera house. Soon after she reveals to him that the divorce papers have been signed, Dan realizes she has had sex with Larry. She claims she did it so he would sign the papers and leave them alone, but Dan is furious and does not trust her.

A distraught Dan confronts Larry to try to get Anna back. Larry tells him Anna never filed the signed divorce papers and suggests that he return to Alice. Since Dan doesn't know where she is, Larry tells him. During the conversation he claims he did not have sex with Alice, but just before Dan leaves he admits that he did.

Alice takes Dan back and decides to return to the States on vacation. While in a hotel room celebrating being back together (and noting that it has been four years since they first met), they talk about the way they met.

After bringing up Larry, Dan asks her whether she had sex with him. She initially denies it, but when Dan comes back from going to get cigarettes and instead brings back a rose, she says she doesn't love him anymore and that she did sleep with Larry. Dan reveals that Larry had already told him about the escapade, but he says he forgives her. She insists that it's over and tells him to leave. The argument culminates in Dan slapping Alice.

At the conclusion of the film, Larry and Anna are together, and Alice returns to New York City alone. As she passes through the immigration checkpoint on her way back into the United States, a shot of her passport shows her real name to be Jane Rachel Jones. She had lied about her name during her entire four-year relationship with Dan but had told Larry her real name at the strip club.

Back in London, Dan returns to Postman's Park, and to his surprise, notices the name Alice Ayres on the tiles of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. The Ayres dedication is to a young woman, "who by intrepid conduct" and at the cost of her young life, rescued three children from a fire.

The final scene, which resembles the first, shows Jane walking on a New York street alone being stared at by several of the men around her. She crosses a crosswalk that appears to have a "Don't Walk" signal up.

As a viewer this movie is about adulthood, the persctive on relationships, love relationships between a couple of mature adults, Larry and Anna and a couple of two unbalanced childish lovers, Dan and Alice. The dept of the feelings involved is truthfull in both couples, the drama, intensity and trauma involved is totally diferent.

In the end, being solid and making a good and workable relationship has much to do with being empathic towards the other than feeling deeply. As a viewer Dan loves in a narcisistic way, too much on his mind the all time, and Alice only feels and block his true story. Dan is a writer of death scrools or obituaries, is selfish and develops a needy, codependent way of loving Alice, truly this builds an illusion about who she is. He writes a book on someone who made him dream, but never gave herself back. They disrespect their own boudaries, and make masks on their intimicy because of their wounds and unadressed traumas.

For me this is a mercurian relationship, being Dan the Virgo/Sagittarius and Alice the gemini/pisces, they gave themselves in the mind and don´t open their intimicy because there was deceipt and pain they didnt want to share, and they were completly absoved by an immense pasion, which they could not forget or adress to bring it to reality, they lost themselves in the water of their dreams uncapable of living the day after day.

Larry and Anna met by accident and they have a turbulent first meeting yet Larry is a stable man, logical but fair, like a libra/aries and a scorpio/taurus, they involve themselves in quite different way, they always known theirs differences and this made the difference, because their love comes from stability, accepting even betrail as test to the strenght of the relationship, the first test to the endurance of the commitment.

Larry makes a lecture and give him a receipt to Dan on being a man, on standing the grounds of being empathic towards others, and bringing it down to the essential, only when you have faced your own traumas and fears can you love someone and give the right support to build a partnership that last through the challenges of a lifetime.