DVD A Closed Book

As A Closed Book begins, distinguished author Sir Paul is planning on writing his first book since a head injury that made him completely blind four years previously. In order to do this he needs a helper so he hires Jane Ryder, an intelligent but mysterious woman who agrees to live with him in his baroque mansion five days a week. Sir Paul is unsurprisingly a fussy, arrogant man who would likely be hard for anyone to deal with. Still, it's hard not to feel sympathy for him as it quickly becomes clear that Jane takes sadistic pleasure in deceiving him. This starts out harmlessly enough with lies about a jigsaw puzzle and made up news stories about the murder of Madonna and the suicide of O.J. Simpson but progresses into harmful territory as she begins to rearrange the furniture and leave books on the stairs. The last few minutes of the film involve some hastily applied twists that don't really give the viewer much of a chance to comprehend the way the situation has changed before the next one appears. As suspense thrillers go, this is pretty standard fare in the plot department.

Since this is a film by maverick auteur Raoul Ruiz the writing is naturally the least important part of the film; as usual his films rely on his unique sensibilities to succeed. For a Ruiz film A Closed Book is fairly low key: there are plenty of unusual angles and the frame tends to be filled with sumptuous details but the camera movements are standard save for the scene in which Jane brazenly tells Sir Paul nonsensical lies as the camera spins wildly directly overhead. There is also an emphasis on the house's architecture, particularly the baroque exterior with its spirals and turrets. A Closed Book is not a film that breaks new ground for Ruiz, in fact the style calls to mind all of the Ruiz films I've seen from the past decade or so including Time Regained, Comedy of Innocence, and That Day but his style is so rich that he could easily spend another twenty years working within it and not exhaust its possibilities.

Somewhat perversely for a film released this year, A Closed Book has already been released on R2 DVD. It's also worth noting that the film seems to have been universally judged by the least important aspect of this particular work: the script. This surely accounts for its absurdly low IMDb score (4.7 as of this writing) and the score of negative reviews it has received from critics who view it as a genre film.

It is very strange to my mind that such a celebrated director as Raoul Ruiz is making straight-to-video movies in the UK! However the English-language world has a goldfish memory for foreign giants and so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. Maybe he needs to get Spike Jonze or Quentin Tarantino to "sponsor" him ^^. Nucingen House didn't even get a DVD release, so we shouldn't look a gift horse in the eye with this one.

So we have an art critic living in a country pile who has gone blind following some nasty maiming. He wishes to publish a final book and thus sets about hiring an "amanuensis" to assist him with this. Tom Conti plays the role of blind critic Paul pretty well, he has just the right mix of pomposity and fragility. The film is quite surreal, but nowhere more so perhaps than when we see a selection of self-absorbed characters interviewed for the position of amanuensis. In this country we never really hailed the arrival of the Surrealist movement, which is perhaps strange as we are about as surreal as it gets. So surreal that we understandably have problems rising out of the fog and making well-realised films about ourselves, although Patrick Keiller's London and Peter Greenaway's The Falls are notable successes. Yes the UK is a nightmare of prejudice, public conformity, self-repression, snobbishness, and reverse snobbishness; all the more bizarre as it's totally unenforced. British lives collectively are a myriad of uncorrelated banalities. We live in post-colonial anomie. Another example in the film is the political canvasser who is timid and petrified at the idea of engaging with someone on a non-superficial level, even if that were to be a well-to-do blind man, and even if that were, ostensibly, her mission. Our politics are quite funny, although we have again an ostensibly socialist party in government, it's just come to light that, in effect, Tesco are able to pay to get proposed legislation torpedoed!

The amanuensis (Jane) is eventually selected and is played by Darryl Hannah. She's fairly clearly hostile to him from the start, but is gentle enough in resting demeanour that it's clear we're seeing a vendetta from an aggrieved party, rather than the acts of a psychotic. There's a lovely example of female passive aggressive behaviour here, which, as someone who is as pompous as they come, though with a strong twist of self-deprecation that most don't ever seem to get, I have experienced myself. Jane sits listening to the usual enthusiastic and self-indulgent discourse, carefully choosing her moment to burst his bubble, when Paul mentions that it was always a bad thing to do for writers to drink, she coldly brings up Bukowski and Hemingway.

There is camera-work here, though the movie is obviously a quickie. The best example would be when the camera floats dreamily as we are told of Princess Diana's appearance in Bhutan. The opening shot of the spires of the pile are suitably surreal, however the atmosphere of the very comfortable gentrified interior is in contrast to that making the opener look slightly contrived. Being a quickie we also have a generic soundtrack over the top, which must have taken all of half an hour to select and edit in during post-production. I doubt anything was shot twice in the movie either, hence the zoom shots when Paul takes his glasses off, which are a bit silly.

For people who care about such things, the twist at the end regarding the critic himself, was pretty obvious in the first act if you are used to looking at paintings with anything other than a blank stare, or have knowledge about the meaning behind the travel itineraries of British men.

Though this is a quick production, done with a minimum of fuss and cost, there's enough artistic value to make this worth a watch. You even get to hear a good recital of the poem Jenny by James Henry Leigh Hunt.