MOVIE REVIEWS

**Menage a Quatre** You may like _Closer_ because of its flawed characters and their doomed relationships. I like it because it's square. The assorted combinations of love and friendship, scorn and resentment, among two males and two females are literally geometrical. Typically, the dependable love triangle pits three characters together, often a heterosexual convention establishing a male lead zig-zagging between two females, or a female lead choosing between two male suitors. What if we include an extra character? How many triangles can be made with four individuals? Four! And _Closer_ expertly covers them all. Next time you see it, draw out a square with each character occupying a corner. Then connect each of the couplings and triangles as they occur, beginning with Julia-Jude-Natalie. Jude falls for Natalie, introduces her to Julia who gets intimate with her camera. The Jude-Clive-Julia triangle is a clever one. Clive is introduced when Jude seduces him online pretending to be Julia who he meets at the aquarium. Often when a movie script or stage play adheres to a strict formula, it turns out flat and predictable. Not _Closer_. Applying a quadrangular network forces each character to cover all the bases, tagging up every way possible, pushing each juncture to the limit.

Writer "Dan" (Jude Law) likes to spend his evenings, when not with his American girlfriend "Alice" (Natalie Portman), teasing other blokes on sex-chat sites. One night he sets up doctor "Larry" (Clive Owen) with a promise to meet at the aquarium with "Anna". The horned up physician duly turns up, only to discover that meantime "Dan" has vengefully despatched the real "Anna" (Julia Roberts) - his part time lover/photographer, to unknowingly meet him instead. Embarrassed looks, sighs and "Larry" feels like a prat but, maybe the outwardly rather aloof "Anna" is interested? What now ensues is all a bit entertainingly far-fetched as an unwitting ménage-à-quatre emerges, becoming increasingly more intimate, then loving, then manipulatively toxic. Are any of these people destined to find happiness with any of the others. Quite frankly, do they deserve it and do we care? I've always found Owen as wooden as a washboard, but here - especially sharing the screen with an on-form Portman, he actually seems to be able to act (a little). His character, I found, comfortably the most odious of the four. Portman is the star of the show, though. Her portrayal of the needy sex kitten vacillates from provocative to desperate with a compelling ease. There's frequently some vitriol in the writing and the juggled storylines well paced as this story of unlikeable people moves along quickly. I think this might work well on stage, it has a characterful intensity to it, but on screen it's well worth a watch - even if it's all a pretty grim appraisal of human behaviour.