Closet Land

A FEMALE WRITER OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IS arrested without understanding why and taken away to a big, bare interrogation hall. With her eyes bandaged she is questioned by a sometimes deceitfully friendly, sometimes brutal policeman. The woman is not allowed to phone her lawyer or in any other way communicate with the outside world. The interrogation soon takes the shape of an absurd nightmare. The man wants her to confess that she's a member of an underground anti-government movement and her books political allegories. He uses bizarre and brutal methods and gives a humiliating performance to force her to sign a confession. She uses her fantasy to endure the cruelties. An intricate relationship develops between the tormentor and the victim who to the end holds on to her dignity and refuses to give up.
Comment:
RADHA BHARADWAJ'S FEATURE FILM DEBUT, Closet Land, focuses on two persons, an interrogator and his prisoner in a closed room which hermetically seals off the action, limited to interrogations, torture and dialogue. The room has no references to reality, no connections to a recognizable time or place. The cool, elegant scenographic construction is like the film as a whole: theatrically abstract. The filmic expression relies mostly on an esthetics of negations, on subtracted possibilities. The reduction, a completely conscious gesture, gives the film an ahistoric quality, a claustrophobic timelessness, and reaches beyond the personal destiny and the specific historical moment to the universal: that which has to move us all.
On a more immediate level, Closet Land has a concrete political message. It's a frightening and cruel, but basically hopeful reflection over man's ability to keep his integrity under a dictatorship with persecutions and censorship. But, for me, one scene opened up Closet Land to a reading beyond the obviously political, towards a deeper criticism of our culture's unconscious ideologies. It was the prolonged torture scene: the interrogator plays a word-association-game with his nearly unconscious victim in order to pick her inside - this become the key to an interpretation where the film suddenly reveals our wish for knowledge as cannibalistic aggression, a violent action in itself. The struggle between executioner and victim, man and woman is not only a political fight for freedom of speech. It's also a painful battle between the conscious and the unconscious, between clarity and mystery - between light and obscurity. The story turns into a settlement of accounts with the belief that everything can -and ought to be - subjected to the scrutiny of a rational intellect. The interrogation leader plays the part of an inquisitioner of knowledge; a man, obsessed with the idea of knowing and classifying everything, to dissect and break apart the terrifying unknown: repressed childhood memories, the female body, the possibility of the phantasm and the darkness in sexuality. _
SARA ARRHENIUS

Medverkande
Madeleine Stowe, Alan Rickman: Producent
Brian Grazer, Ron Howard: Manus
Radha Bharadwaj: Foto
Bill Pope: Talat språk
English