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Closet Land (1991)
Rate:
2
Viewed:
4/20
4/20:
Anybody who liked Closet Land probably had his head kicked in by a rented mule.
The premise is this: while being surrounded by Eiko Ishioka's easy-to-distract interiors, Madeleine Stowe is tortured by Alan
Rickman for ninety-five minutes. That's it. There's nothing else. Making her directorial debut, Radha Bharadwaj will do one
more film before concluding her sorry career.
Four million dollars got spent on this steaming pile of crap, and the total take at the box office was 259,012 measly dollars.
No wonder why I had a hard time finding a VHS copy. I read Closet Land had the reputation of being passed around
as an easy way to lose friends.
Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman do their best, but for two people, it's impossible to make a film work for more than
thirty minutes when the dialogue sucks. The champions in this department are still Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine when
they did Sleuth mostly because of Anthony Shaffer's superlative writing that made their acting so good, hence the Oscar
nominations.
In my opinion, the most effective way to win over somebody is to torture a small girl. The whole thing will be over in one
minute flat, and she'll sign the confession. And when she does, it'll be a "who cares?" moment. It won't
matter because after the author is released, she can move to another country, continue to write children's books, and forget
the whole thing ever happened.
All in all, the point of sitting through the torture of Closet Land is completely lost on me.