CLOSET LAND
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
CLOSET LAND is a movie written and directed by Radha Bharadwaj. The cast consists in its entirety of Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman. Yes, a two-actor movie. No one else appears on the screen through the entire running time.
The movie has attracted some talented and well-known people to become involved with it. Ron Howard is one of the executive producers and Janet Meyers is the producer. Philip Glass is credited with something like "creative musical direction", the meaning of which is vague but the sound track does have a Glassian quality to it.
It has also attracted a number well-known backers to pay for it. The names Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Sundance, Pepsi, and Coors appear in the credits, too. As well as that of Amnesty International.
Amnesty International is certainly central to CLOSET LAND, which is about a woman being interrogated and tortured to make her sign a confession that her children's book is politically subversive. This is a movie about the horror of torture and the ability of the human mind to resist.
CLOSET LAND transpires almost entirely in one all-purpose room and consists of Rickman and Stowe alternately torturing and being tortured in physical, emotional, and psychological ways. The worst, bloodiest violence, as in a Greek tragedy, takes place in the dialogue descriptions and away from the view of the audience. The rest is nakedly exposed to us.
The most interesting thing about the story is that at one dramatic moment the victim and the tormentor trade places. From then on, he knows he can't win no matter what else happens and she knows she can't lose even if she can't escape. I don't think I have even seen this before.
The weakest aspect of the movie is that it is definitely a filmed play and not a movie as such. Nothing is done that couldn't be done on a live stage. The film maker uses animation and a few limited special effects, but a creative director could give us exactly the end results on stage. The movie is extremely talkative, limited to one set and two actors. It induces in the audience extreme claustrophobia and general tension, which is to the good and part of the "message" of the film, but it also limits the audience that will tolerate it.
Certainly the strongest parts of the movie are its point of view and its actors. The point of view I'll leave mostly to those of you who will be lucky enough to see CLOSET LAND, for it has a very limited release; but it may show up in the better video stores in a few months. Suffice it to say that the film's view of political violence--abduction, terror, and torture--is both complex and unequivocal. Indeed, the hope it offers against these evils is decidedly of a spiritual and/or moral sort, that may be of little comfort to the materialists amongst us, but which comforts, informs, and ennobles the struggle against torture and its kin.
The actors are perfectly wonderful. One would be hard-pressed to say who outacts the other. Rickman is the more identifiable as a movie actor for me--he has often played intellectual heavies-and so his performance is less surprising perhaps. His character is an actor, too, in a way, and so he gets the fun of playing an actor acting which is always impressive, I think. Stowe is less familiar to me, but I won't soon forget the moral commitment she brought to her performance; her appearance is amazingly flexible and she has a marvelous sense of her body in her acting. She also projects complete conviction whether she's terrified, outraged, or triumphant.
CLOSET LAND is one of the roughest movies I have sat through in a long time because it is one of the truest and it personally challenges me as the audience to measure up to its outrage and its ideals. I recommend it highly to all who get a chance to see it.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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