One of Raul Ruiz’s most accessible works if
measured by the ease of dissecting what’s on screen (which didn’t however mean it
was any more effectively distributed and marketed than most of the others), A Closed Book (alternatively
and less gracefully titled Blind Revenge) takes place almost entirely
within a large country house occupied by Sir Paul (Tom Conti), a former art
critic blinded a few years earlier in a car accident, who engages Jane (Daryl
Hannah) to help him write his autobiography. For a while the movie plays like a
robustly peculiar character study as the two work out a mutual equilibrium and
routine, telling each other what they dislike about the other’s style and so on,
then out of nowhere it swerves into the grotesque as Jane starts to mess with Paul,
walking about in the nude, fueling the fire with his valuable book collection rather
than with logs, and then (once the housekeeper is conveniently out of the way) turning
paintings upside down, moving furniture around, and ramping things up still further.
Assessed as conventional narrative, it’s a weakness that the ultimate revelation
of Jane’s motives, and Paul’s subsequent reactions to them, seem (to say the
least) inadequately connected to what’s gone before (the movie might as well
have posited say that she’s an obsessive animal lover harboring a grudge at
Paul for having once kicked her dog), although looked at more generally, it’s a
swerve that reflects Ruiz’s playful sense of narrative contingency. Conti is in
robust form, and as if to satisfy some producer's quirky contractual demand, the movie includes
single-scene appearances by Elaine Paige and Simon MacCorkindale, so, there you
go. A delectably lasting moment has Jane making up a bunch of fake news to
tantalize Paul (who conveniently never listens to the radio or TV) including
that Donald Trump has become a Muslim (hey, if only…).
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