[ Closer 2004 ] Love seekers but had no idea of what love was

Closer - directed by Mike Nichols - might not be an unfamiliar movie title to us. However, if you have not given it a look, I would bring down here a brief summary of it.

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On a day which was as ordinary as others, 2 strangers met each other's eyes on the street full of passengers. A striper from US, an obituary writer living at London, quickly they fell in love (or something they called it "love") after he helped her from the accident. Things were so smooth until Dan portrayed by Jude Law aka the obituary writer found out a feeling had risen in his heart for Julia Robert's Anna - a portrait photographer. Nonetheless, Anna refused to be with him since she already knew about Alice's existence, played by Natalia Portman, his beloved. Soon later, thanks to Dan's trick, Anna met Larry, a dermatologist role Clive Owen played, and they got married. Time passed by, Dan could not get Anna out of his head and neither could Anna, they had met up the night before Larry came back home after going on business. Larry figured out the truth, at the same time Dan let Alice know about his feelings for Anna, and the two couples broke up. Anna got together with Dan, Alice came back to her striper job whilst Larry sunk himself into the hopeless desire for Anna's return. He made it true, after all. Anna came back to his embrace, Dan sought for Alice. At the end, Anna lulled herself into sleep by turning her back against Larry on bed, in the meantime Alice walked away from Dan and headed back to New York - the place she came from.

I am not into watching movies so frequently, but I think many people had mistaken the characters in this one represented for love. The scenes were not filmed smoothly in a time phase, the entire stages the characters had gone through were actually many different and long stages. So the suffering and broken elements in them were actually more lingering than we could imagine. I will list below the features of each character I could tell.

Alice: Strong but emotionally dependent.

Alice is the kind of girl who knows exactly how to seduce the man she wants yet she can't fight against the feeling of being loved, no matter if it is obsession or possession or toxicity. I realized it at the scene Alice did nothing than wiping her tears when she overheard Dan confessing his love to Anna. You could say, Alice reflected perfectly the shattered soul just by looking inside the movement of her pupils, the blushing traces on her eyes. She had brought it out crystal clear. She worked as a striper, and people of that era (or even until now), still judged her as a prostitute. Either way, that was her method to make ends meet, so she simply tried not to give a damn about those gossiping albeit the quiet sobbing of her heart. And sorry for a bit spoiler if you haven't watched it yet: Alice is not her real name.

Anna: Mature but emotionally unstable.

In the comparison with Alice, Anna is the kind of woman who is gentle and mature enough, yet inside her is a slumbering wildness. She needed a home, a family, that is the reason why she came for Larry instead of Dan. Besides, although she was haunted by the guilt of having fallen for Dan, she was urged to try it with him for an insane pleasure. Anna's ex spouse was a caveman abusing her, so for the next time, she simply made a safe choice of the one bringing her the assurance of happiness and suavity. She did not struggle amongst badmouthing like Alice did, however, she was struggling between the desire to be wild and to find peace.

Dan: Cupidity for love in the disguise of a scholar.

Dan is a manipulative man over Alice and Anna, he convinced those two about his love towards, nonetheless, he himself mistook that greed for true love. He is the typical for people who mythologizes love without knowing the revelation of it. He had soon chosen Anna yet he could not give up on Alice since he thought Anna was the love of his life, in the meantime knowing Alice would always put his sake all above. Although, he gave them none of those things in response. He was in a desperate fear for being deceived, which resulted in his utter seek for truth despite its roughest and grotesque side. He ended up being reckless with Alice - the one that suffered from him the most since she was attached to him much than Anna was, by demanding her to tell truths which would hurt her. The moment his personality showed off obviously was his ruthless slap for Alice when she reacted exceedingly to his ridiculous requirement about truth.

Larry: Spiteful tongue, however, tenacious and devilish smarty.

If Dan represented pretenders hiding their fears, Larry would be the figuration of alpha males. With brief glance, he brought people the feeling of a gentleman, but further after having engaged with Anna, another characteristic came out from him. He used the most venomous words to talk to his wife right after she confessed her affair with Dan even though just a jiff before he was sobbing in her embrace. Larry loved Anna to the point that he still pleaded her with her return to him despite the fact she had hidden from him her evocation for Dan through their long-term engagement. On the other hand, he attacked Dan without mercy using the devilish strategy and won over him victoriously. Larry also had some strange feelings for Alice because of the vulnerable aura on the contrary with her thorny appearance. Lastly, Anna was his after-all answer.

I would say the characters irritating me the most in the movie were Dan and Anna. After separating ways, I do not think they love each other, or Anna loves Larry and Dan adores Alice, the most I could feel was they only love themselves. Actually, the four of characters were deeply in love with their romantic needs. Whilst Alice believed in the reciprocation so she were willing to give out, Larry gave out as if it was an investment to which he would have the valuable output fairly to his attempting input. At least, they were giving. For Anna and Dan, paradoxically, they only found a short-term happiness in being together after their breakups with exes. Owing to the fact that they wanted too much yet they gave so little. But you know what, the question popped up in my head after finishing this piece was "Why wouldn't they leave and find love within themselves?"

The relationship depicted in the movie was an ordinarily conflicting one, and the root of problem was the lacking of self-love attitude that led all characters to the misconception of love. Love and pain, they are not tagging along. But in case you have watched, the couples in the film always somehow hurt each other and sometimes including themselves (intentionally and unintentionally) eventually they excused it in the name of love. That is not true, in my perspective.

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Dan hurt Alice because he could not resist the enticement of the new arousing feelings for Anna, at the same time he was too coward to let his for-sure safety go.

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Anna hurt Dan because she accepted Larry's last request to sleep with him so that he would sign their divorce paper.

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Larry hurt Anna with his venomous words after he found out she was spending the night before with Dan. Not mentioning that Anna had hurt him too when she decided to sleep with Dan.

The love story ended with the official breakup between Alice and Dan, different from the comeback between Anna and Larry. In my opinion, Alice made a right decision for herself. She was the youngest one but the spirit of wild youth allowed her to realize Dan's sentiments were an unreal reality. She was the first to speak up the goddamn rosy hallucination 4 of them was holding on, and also the first to walk away from improper person whom she thought she would have loved him forever.

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Larry made his choice to hold Anna back, however, I wonder whether he knew Anna would never be under his ownership, and that her homecoming was for safety only, not because of her love towards him? He might have not known, yet Anna was once again stuck within her safe area albeit all those burning desires she tried to conceal. Who knows she would change, for a better life besides Larry, as a real mature adult would do to achieve happiness?

Dan simply reaped what he sowed, now then he had neither Anna nor Alice for his life. I am not saying he deserved that lonely ending, but he needed a lesson to reflect all the things he had done wrong to others for his own needs. The silver point of the movie to me was the detail that Alice told Larry about her real name and of course he did not buy it. The rest of 3 characters thought Alice was really Alice, and even her darling Dan had written a book about her life, he had no clue of her Jane Jones identity. Not until Dan saw the below announcement had he figured out his angelic Alice had lied to him from the beginning, yet the more painful truth that he had never known the easiest fact of the girl he kept claiming his love for her.

The ending scene resembled the entrance one, as Alice walked through the street while the signal was saying "stop". Would she end up reuniting with Dan again? Or this time she would die for real? Or nothing would happen, Alice would be safe and it means she has already moved on from the past?

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So after all, Where is this love?
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