Close My Eyes (R)
A film by Stephen Poliakoff
Starring Alan Rickman, Clive Owens, Saskia Reeves
Cinema Nova and Brighton Bay, March 1993
Reviewed by Mario Giorgetti
This second feature by writer-director Stephen Poliakoff (Hidden City, 1987) is set in Britain, where life in general, as well as love, sex and relationships, has become more problematic and confused than it was a decade ago. So much so that even two fairly balanced people like Richard and his newly married sister Natalie, both beset by dead-end lives and existential dilemmas, find it incredibly easy to fall in love and into an incestuous relationship.
Close My Eyes was inspired by Poliakoff's 1975 play Hitting Town, which was set against the background of the Guildford and Birmingham bombings.
The film retains the original theme but introduces different characters and different dilemmas, while the backdrop of urban terrorism is replaced by the contemporary reality of AIDS and the recession. Explains Poliakoff: "I wanted the film to be a way of looking at how we live now. In particular I wanted to look at how sex has become so much more complicated in the last few years."
Considering that we're talking about one of the most enduring of the sexual taboos in our society, here the shocking truth seems to slip by us almost unnoticed. We are presented with a fait accompli before we've had a chance to be truly shaken by what is about to happen. To feel the full force, one must first suspend disbelief completely and allow oneself to be convinced that Richard and Natalie are really brother and sister. Perhaps it all happens too quickly.
But then one is also surprised at the spontaneous ease with which such a relationship develops and grows. There is none of the revulsion and self-loathing that such a liaison would normally engender in two such sensitive people. This is beyond sexual revolution, beyond free choice in love; it touches something most of us are prepared to accept only in the context of fiction. And yet Richard and Natalie themselves seem incredibly unperturbed; they inhabit an insulated microcosm of their own and are living a fiction which we fear can only end in tragedy.
Nonetheless, the story has credibility in its characters as well as in their emotions. Especially brilliant acting by Alan Rickman as Sinclair, Natalie's rich and sophisticated husband, and creditable performances by Saskia Reeves and Clive Owen as the incestuous sister and brother — two particularly difficult roles — legitimate and render intelligible an otherwise difficult theme.