Closer

I decided to catch up on my 'to-watch' list of out-dated movies before the list becomes longer. This evening I chose Closer. It is an amazing movie which you love to hate. It fully explores the selfish nature of human emotions of love and lust. When is the moment that you know you must say no to temptation or should you follow your heart before you regret walking away from someone who might possibly be the love of your life?

When Dan meets Alice, it is love at first sight. He is an obituary writer while she is a cute young American girl who has came to London to escape from a bad relationship. A year later, Dan meets Anna, a beautiful American photographer, whom he lusts after. Anna is separated from her husband then, and she doesn't want to get involved with Dan who is in a relationship with Alice.

Later, Dan meets Larry on an online sex chat. He pretends to be Anna, has a steamy conversation with Larry and continues to play a practical joke on him by asking Larry to meet him at the Aquarium. Incidentally the real Anna happened to be there. Anna and Larry hit it off really well. Dan has accidentally played the role of cupid in matchmaking Anna and Larry.

While Dan and Anna leads separate lives, each of them continues to see someone else they fancy. Yet their lives cross and feelings grow deeper. One year later, Dan decides to come clean with Alice with regards to his feelings towards Anna. At the same time, Anna is being grilled by her current husband Larry when she reveals of her relationship with Dan. It isn't a happy ending for all four of them. They are all entangled up in a messy pot of emotions filled up with love, hatred, desire, lust, forgiveness, deception, etc. At the end of the day, they are all cowards of love. Neither has the courage to face love and grab happiness by the neck.

What the four individuals have gone through is such a common everyday event in our lives. We have seen friends, family and even ourselves in similar or exact situations of being messed up when a third party enters into the sacred space between two persons who are supposedly in love with each other and have implicitly and mutually agreed to be exclusive to each other.

Commitment is so rare these days, and this is exactly what the film speaks of. No one understands what love is anymore, yet we all know exactly how the pain feels like. Isn't it interesting to understand how well we remember painful memory?

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 fairy clouds.