Taglines: There are some relationships so taboo they’re irresistible.
Close My Eyes movie storyline. After some years of tension, Richard begins a sexual relationship with his sister Natalie, who is now married. The relationship between Richard and Natalie proves dangerously obsessional. Their private intensity (& working class origins) contrast with the middle-class, inhibited, stuffy public scenes we see in the Richmond world into which Natalie has moved with her marriage. As the guilt and intensity of the siblings increases we seem to be heading for disaster, especially when Natalie’s husband Sinclair finds out.
Close My Eyes is a 1991 film written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff and starring Alan Rickman, Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves as well as Lesley Sharp and Karl Johnson. Music was by Michael Gibbs (who would also provide the music for Poliakoff’s next film, Century) and the film was produced for Beambright and FilmFour International by Therese Pickard. The film won the Evening Standard film award for best picture in 1991.
The film is largely a grand-scale re-working of Poliakoff’s earlier stage play Hitting Town in that the main plot remains one of brother/sister incest, although the film also covers the chaos (as the film sees it) that was the initial stages of the London Docklands development, the late 1980s recession and attitudes towards AIDS. A parallel thread running through the movie is the rapacious replacement of the classical by the modern, represented visually by old and new buildings.
Film Review for Close My Eyes
Contemporary London, as depicted in Stephen Poliakoff’s “Close My Eyes,” is gripped by a feverish malaise. Construction cranes scar the skyline for as far as the eye can see, and the weather is so hot that people have begun to mutter about the end of the world. There is also grim talk about the AIDS epidemic. And when one of the characters makes a date in the sleazier part of town, his first stop is at a vending machine dispensing condoms.
In this parched, overheated atmosphere, an incestuous affair between Natalie (Saskia Reeves), a restless young woman who drifts from job to job, and her slightly younger brother Richard (Clive Owen) almost makes sense. In a world where nature seems to have slipped out of balance, it is a way of unconsciously affirming the general state of disorder.
“Close My Eyes,” which opens today at the Quad Cinema, begins with a sequence of flashbacks that reveal Natalie and Richard to be smart, attractive people who have drifted for years without a guiding focus. Natalie has always flirted recklessly with her brother, and one day a lingering kiss precipitates a ravenous mutual passion.
Complicating matters is the fact that Natalie has finally settled down with someone. Her husband, Sinclair (Alan Rickman), an heir to a margarine fortune, is a garrulous businessman who lives in a magnificent riverside mansion and works, as he puts it, in “trends and analysis.” Although Natalie and Richard fight against their attraction, it proves overwhelming. And in their clandestine rendezvous they tear at each other with the frenzy of wild animals. When Natalie finally decides to end the affair, Richard, who has given himself over completely to the relationship, begins to come apart, and an undercurrent of violence rises to the surface.
Mr. Poliakoff, a prolific English playwright whose dramas “Shout Across the River” and “American Days” have both had New York productions, has given his story a theatrical structure whose metaphors clunk a bit too heavily for the machinery not to seem overexposed. Yet the characters in the film’s central triangle are drawn with an extraordinary depth and subtlety. Natalie, though beautiful and possessed of an aristocratic willfulness, is also shown to be socially and intellectually insecure. And in the company of the voluble Sinclair, who has an opinion about everything that crosses his line of vision, she is reduced to moody silences.
Richard is a brash, swinging bachelor with a social conscience, who as the affair begins, has taken a job with a regulatory agency that monitors the progress of a gargantuan development touted as “the new Venice.” But as community-spirited as he is, he has as little success in forcing the unscrupulous developers to keep their word as he has in reining in his emotions once they have spun out of control. Richard’s and Natalie’s love scenes, and later their fight scenes, have a visceral energy that seems so spontaneous there are moments when one feels almost embarrassed to be caught watching.
Best of all is Mr. Rickman’s Sinclair, who in a welcome departure from his usually sinister roles, gives the dilettantish husband many layers. Beneath a supercilious facade, he is as vulnerable as Richard. Indeed, one of the film’s most striking qualities is its detailed observation of the ways in which two grown men of very different temperament become emotionally unstrung.
“Close My Eyes” is an unusually good-looking film. Witold Stok’s photography gives the London suburbs a tropical lushness that is appropriate to the situation. And Michael Gibbs’s throbbing semi-classical score helps keep the film’s heated atmosphere well above 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Close My Eyes (1992)
Directed by: Stephen Poliakoff
Starring: Alan Rickman, Clive Owen, Saskia Reeves, Karl Johnson, Lesley Sharp, Kate Gartside, Karen Knight, Niall Buggy, Campbell Morrison, Geraldine Somerville
Screenplay by: Stephen Poliakoff
Production Design by: Luciana Arrighi
Cinematography by: Witold Stok
Film Editing by: Michael Parkinson
Costume Design by: Amy Roberts
Art Direction by: John Ralph
Music by: Michael Gibbs
MPAA Rating: R for strong sensuality, and for language.
Distributed by: Castle Hill Productions
Release Date: February 21, 1992
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