CLOSET CLOSER

So--what is there left to say about CLOSER that hasn't already been said? How about everything. Okay, the good dialogue and acting have already been well commented upon. But when it comes to the story, the thing it is all about, nobody says nothing. Leastwise nothing pertinent. All the reviewers seem satisfied to masturbate on their keypads about the surface sexual quadrille, all the while ignoring the homosexual tango that CLOSER is.

C'mon folks! Dan seduces Larry in an Internet chat room saying his name is Anna and she wants to suck his cock. This exchange causes Larry to meet a real Anna at an aquarium and the sexual á quatre is on. Though I was enjoying the snappy repartee, solid acting and directing, I couldn't really relate to the behavior of the ensemble until, that is, it dawned on me that I was attending a closet quartette. Once I understood that, I could better enjoy the games that the characters were playing with each other and that the author is playing with his audience.

Although Anna and Alice are less a part of the quartette than they are interactive accompaniment to the passionate tango being danced by Larry and Dan, Larry being very macho and Dan so very responsive to his partner's every move and mood. Fortunately, they never physically embrace their real desires or the movie would end prematurely, like Larry's masturbation scene.

I guess CLOSER is about a few other things that I don't get. Why, for instance, the aquarium, referred to with such seem significance? But Larry being a dermatologist and Anna a portrait photographer seem to share some brotherhood of interest in surface appearances, for whatever that is worth. So, a watchable film, but as coded as a Cole Porter song lyric.