Closer

Menage a Quatre

You may like Closer because of its flawed characters and their doomed relationships. I like it because it's square. The assorted combinations of love and friendship, scorn and resentment, among two males and two females are literally geometrical. Typically, the dependable love triangle pits three characters together, often a heterosexual convention establishing a male lead zig-zagging between two females, or a female lead choosing between two male suitors. What if we include an extra character? How many triangles can be made with four individuals? Four! And Closer expertly covers them all. Next time you see it, draw out a square with each character occupying a corner. Then connect each of the couplings and triangl...

Writer "Dan" (Jude Law) likes to spend his evenings, when not with his American girlfriend "Alice" (Natalie Portman), teasing other blokes on sex-chat sites. One night he sets up doctor "Larry" (Clive Owen) with a promise to meet at the aquarium with "Anna". The horned up physician duly turns up, only to discover that meantime "Dan" has vengefully despatched the real "Anna" (Julia Roberts) - his part time lover/photographer, to unknowingly meet him instead. Embarrassed looks, sighs and "Larry" feels like a prat but, maybe the outwardly rather aloof "Anna" is interested? What now ensues is all a bit entertainingly far-fetched as an unwitting ménage-à-quatre emerges, becoming increasingly more intimate, then loving, then manipulatively toxic....