How does a director make a movie about torture that allows audiences to watch without turning away, but does not allow them to forget that torture is a violation of human sacredness that is going on this second?
To my knowledge, most serious movies about torture have been documentaries. But in Closet Land, a nameless man and woman interact in the surrealistic interrogation room of an unidentified country. And, although the film has definite faults, it succeeds in making the viewer breathe the terrifying air of that room in a way that cannot be shaken off when the lights come up.
The victim in Closet Land is a writer, a children's book author who tells the interrogator sincerely, "I'm not a political person. My stories are fluff." Her tormentor counters that children's minds make the best receptacles, and that her latest story is "thinly veiled anti-government propaganda." All the woman need do to obtain her freedom is sign a statement to that effect. She refuses.
Psychological torture is frighteningly well-portrayed. From the start, the interrogator plays brutal mind games -- pretending to let the woman go only to lock the door when she hesitates, acting as her comforter one minute ("You must put your trust in me") and striking her the next, switching on government tapes of her most intimate conversations. The central images are of intricate psychological, not physical, cruelty, and the viewer learns the truth of the warning, "It's the suspense, not the pain, that will drive you mad."
Radha Bharadwaj's screenplay (which won the 1989 Nichols Screenwriting Award) and superb acting by Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman are powerful vehicles. But the script sometimes falters. Pointless jokes weaken the building tension as the interrogation begins, and toward the end of the film the woman becomes a spotlighted preaching head feeding the audience insights they could better come to on their own ("We all know this goes on, but we shut our eyes to it ...").
I also felt the woman's physical beauty was given too much prominence in what is basically a statement against the oppression of women. The film walks a thin line: It is important to dramatize the sexual threat constantly present when a woman is imprisoned, without making the sexual violence titillating (as is done so insidiously in the TV series Twin Peaks). Closet Land portrays the pain of sexual invasion very well, but the camera never lets us forget that we are looking at a gorgeous creature. Although she was yanked from bed in the middle of the night, the woman is wearing eye makeup. After hours of torture and sleeplessness, her face remains radiant, unmarked, her long hair shiny with an arrow-straight part.
This is regrettable because the strongest connection the film makes is between the sexual violence women are subjected to and the need to dominate that drives a government to torture. If there is any subversive intent in the woman's latest children's story, it is to protest what little girls are often forced to do in the dark. Government censors immediately interpret her allegory as anti-state. And, the film makes clear, the government is right: A voice raised against rape is, or could easily become, a voice against tyranny.
THE FILM elegantly suggests why despots are afraid of writers and why writers are often able to defy the iron fist of the state -- because of the power of the imagination. The woman, we discover, learned early on to endure pain by flexing the creative powers of her mind. The "fluff" of her stories -- imaginary companions and empowering allegories -- gives her a way to keep her spirit intact as the man breaks her body, and her subversive imagination sustains others.
Closet Land affirms the enduring strength of art by direct allusions to 1984, Brave New World, and other works. The movie's format strongly echoes the Greek tragedy Antigone (and Jean Anouilh's 1944 adaptation of that play): a strongman representing the state confronts a rebellious woman who insists on a higher law.
The connection to Antigone may explain the Greek columns in the center of designer Eiko Ishioka's set, a timeless concoction of high ceilings and modernistic furniture that bears no resemblance to any prison in any country. Some viewers will find this artistic setting (which Ishioka describes as the third character in the play) and the sometimes unnatural dialogue irritating. It seems possible that this script would work better as a play. My husband commented that the preview of Closet Land looked like a Calvin Klein ad.
But there is a power to being kept in Ishioka's eerie room and hearing dialogue circle back on itself. Bharadwaj's technique forces the viewer to experience some of what detainees endure (when the woman is blindfolded, for example, the screen goes black). After two hours, I was ready to weep with claustrophobia and hopelessness.
I went home from this movie and wrote down a list of its faults -- but that night I was unable to sleep because I knew that somewhere in the world, someone was being tortured. The next day I wrote to Amnesty International to get back on their letter-writers list.
That's one measure of the movie's success.
Naomi Thiers was a free-lance writer living in Washington, DC when this review appeared.
Closet Land. Directed by Radha Bharadwaj. Produced by Janet Meyers. Released by Universal Studios. 1991.
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