TORTURE AND SURREALISM IN TWO-PERSON DRAMA

By Steven Rea

(Philadelphia Inquirer, March 9, 1991)

Something's out of whack in Closet Land, an intense two-person drama about political oppression, torture and censorship that looks more like a Calvin Klein Obsession ad than an impassioned treatise for human rights. Written and directed by Temple film school alumna Radha Bharadwaj, the entire thing takes place in a jaunty-angled, checkerboard-floored room dominated by towering Greek columns. At any moment, you expect some moody model with severe hair to wander across the colorless scape, murmuring angst-ridden non sequiturs

And, at times, it seems that Madeleine Stowe - as a children's book author who has been blindfolded, handcuffed and taken to this supra-designed house of inquisition (the work of Eiko Ishioka, of M. Butterfly fame) - is just that: an ethereal beauty espousing weird fragments of poetry in a commercial for high-priced perfume.

With its starkly surreal set - the centerpiece of which is a gleaming black inverted pyramid that serves double-duty as desk and torture-table - and its minimalist cast (Stowe is the Woman, Alan Rickman her warden, the Man), Closet Land feels like a piece of theater that hasn't been "opened up" for the big screen. It's deliberately claustrophobic, the camera zooming in on the blindfolded face of the prisoner, on the beads of sweat flecking the interrogator's brow. Bharadwaj wants us to feel the brutal sense of confinement, the encaged helplessness, but she's put her victim in a room that calls way too much attention to itself. It is architecture with a capital A, in an artsy allegory about totalitarianism, sadism and mind control.

Set in a nameless country with its nameless protagonists, Closet Land evokes Kafka (and the Kafka-inspired '60s British TV series, The Prisoner). There's also an element of the dark, nightmarish whimsy of Lewis Carroll - at times, Bharadwaj's script is perversely funny, gleefully sick. Rickman has most of these lines - the actor, best known for his villainous turn in Die Hard, brings a heated, twisted energy to the proceedings. Slithering around on the floor, throwing his voice like a demented ventriloquist, he is at once sinister and sorrowful - he is no mere cardboard cutout of Evil. In accusatory, bureaucratic tones, he grills Stowe about her newest book, the story of a lonely child whose imaginary friends spring to life from the racks of clothes hanging in her mother's closet.

"Why was the child locked in the closet?" Rickman demands. "You've made the child a martyr and the mother a tyrant," he says.

"You are guilty of subliminal indoctrination," he declares. "(This is) thinly veiled propaganda designed to stir dissent in the hearts of children." (The censorship of children's literature - the recent campaign against Dr. Seuss' The Lorax comes to mind - is another issue Bharadwaj alludesm to; the film's implicit themes also echo recent controversies over the National Endowment for the Arts, and reports of torture by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait. It's a veritable grab-bag of political and artistic no-nos.)

Stowe, in a white sleep-dress (she was taken from her house in the middle of the night), responds to the accusations with timbral degrees of fear, confusion and stoicism. As the psychological and physical violence ensues(at one point, he rips the toenails from her foot), the relationship between the characters begins to change.

It is Bharadwaj's intent, as Closet Land unfolds, to link the mass atrocities of political regimes with the individual atrocities of childhood sexual abuse. It is a provocative, powerful statement, but it's muddied in pretension.

Closet Land, for all its daring artifice and occasional glimmers of passion, is a chilly, intellectual exercise. It is a movie drawn from the imagination of an aesthete, not from any true reality of terror.

 

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page