A Closed Book (2010) - 3/4

Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors is the centerpiece of Raul Ruiz's new and frankly unexpected thriller, A Closed Book. The image is famous for being the height of perspectivist painting. It depicts two elegantly-dressed ambassadors standing on either side of the frame. Between them is a skewed skull, which the viewer may only see by gazing at an angle. Standing front-on, the skull looks like a mistake, a stretched object of unrecognizable form.

In the two-person drama of A Closed Book, both characters are unable to recognize the threat they present to each other, to see the skull that stands between them. Their perspectives are wrong, too limited by each their own motives and histories. These characters are Sir Paul Napier (Tom Conti), a highly-respected art critic now old, retired, and left eye-less due to an accident; and Jane Ryder (Daryl Hannah), an art student who has just acquired the job of being Paul's amanuensis for writing his final book, his autobiography, titled A Closed Book.

Ruiz achieves a sympathy shift at about the thirty-minute point in this film that is difficult to achieve at all, let alone so smoothly. I began by assuming the gentlemanly, but very frank Paul with his eccentricities and occasional lack of patience is playing a perverse game, like a villain in a John Fowles novel. Soon, however, little clues start showing that Paul may be the victimized, not the victimizer. In subtle ways, Jane expresses contempt. She stands before him totally nude as he bathes. He can't see her and she's not merely using the opportunity to get some nudism out of her system: never has such a beautiful body been such an expression of contempt. It is an act of disrespect and humiliation, though he'll never know. The observant viewer will also notice Paul's paintings getting turned upside-down and objects mysteriously displaced. He doesn't know, so what's the point? Sheer contempt.

Were that contempt an anomaly, not unlike the disappearing girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock, I think A Closed Book would be a stronger film than it is. I can't resist saying A Closed Book would have been better left open. The film offers a resolution, an explanation, that debases the film somehow. It does complete the Ambassadors motif, however, as both characters spell a certain symbolic death to one another, when finally they exchange perspectives.

Of course, a Raul Ruiz film can be enjoyed in nine and sixty ways "and every single one of them is right." You can ignore the plot and just soak up the melodramatic atmosphere and Ruiz's very visible direction. You'd almost think he's been watching Mario Bava films, for all the showy moves. You can also enjoy getting into Paul's complex mind. He's certainly no stereotype eccentric grump. He's a complicated man with a sense of dignity and generosity whose eccentricity comes out of genuine depth. Jane is a complex character herself; she's certainly not a mere fury a la The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Her conscience shows through in just how often she apologizes. The performances are also enjoyable, being so suited to this very Anglo-Saxon mode of melodrama, at times very real and at others justifiably hammy. It's not so much the actors that are hammy as the characters. Or you can just enjoy the art-filled set. Or the slow, deliberate moments, like when Paul's housekeeper tries to figure out The Ambassadors and when he tells her a story about his youth.

I certainly enjoyed spending time in A Closed Book, though it is in some ways vapid, obvious, even pompous, and weakened by its closed ending and sometimes heavy-handed symbolism. In other ways, perhaps it's none of those things. It's a matter of perspective.