Before talking about this extremely thought-provoking Mike Nichols film, it is important to warn you that this is not a date movie. In fact, it is the absolute antithesis of date movies -- a complex, bitter and cynical tale of infidelity and sex.

Adapted by playwright Patrick Marber, and based on his successful play, Closer is a unashamedly theatrical film about four very twisted characters, their kinks emphasised by the fact that they are very pretty people: Jude Law [Images] is Dan, who claims he's a 'sort of journalist' and writes obituaries for a living; Natalie Portman [Images] calls herself Alice, and is a stripper; Julia Roberts [Images] is a photographer called Anna, specialising in portraits; and Clive Owen [Images] is Larry, an extremely screwed-up doctor with one helluva temper.

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Dan finds Alice on a London [Images] road, the victim of a careless car accident. Taking her to hospital, the glib Englishman predictably charms the red-haired bohemian American tourist. The film opens, therefore, with this misleading warmth and positivity, as the characters conveniently jump into the L word with great alacrity.

And Closer is about the jumps, the abruptness. Suddenly we're in the future, and Dan, we learn from the subsequent dialogue, has written a novel. About Alice. When we next meet him, he's getting his picture taken for the book's jacket, and Anna is the tall photographer on the job. The two exchange ice-cold repartee, rousing them enough to share a forbidden moment, which is something Alice instinctively sniffs out. She breaks, and Dan falls for Anna, who realises that 'he's taken.'

Meanwhile, Dan, posing as Anna the ravenous nymphomaniac, meets Larry at a chat room online. Larry, the kind of dermatologist who would make your skin crawl, is extremely excited by 'Anna' and sets off to meet her. Entirely by accident, he does run into Anna and makes a royal fool of himself. With an intensely clairvoyant guess, she assumes this is Dan's work. She and Larry hit it off tremendously, and their in-joke is to refer to Dan privately as Cupid.

More leaps. More abruptness. More sordid betrayal as both couples break up and intertwine in unholy alliances. The word 'love' is bandied about amid a whirlwind of hardcore profanity, as the film becomes a ruthlessly incisive look at relationships. The diktat is that they are, by nature, cruel, and shards of fact from that statement break through to your consciousness when watching their stories unfold. Despite loathing the characters, you develop empathy for them, and realise that Closer is much deeper than skin, or sin. On one level, it's a hideous game of one-upmanship the men indulge in; on another, it's the consideration of what we cannot stomach � truth or betrayal?

The film isn't without flaws, and the set-ups seem increasingly contrived as they go on, with an over-the-top and melodramatic conversation between Alice and Larry in a strip club completely at odds with the characters thus far. There are times when the script devices -- the leaps into specific moments of tension -- completely backfire. The direction is just about competent, and one constantly, and wistfully, feels that a few more redrafts of the script could have made Closer an enduring, memorable film. As it currently stands, it's a pretty, painful, one-time watch.

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A lot of the film is in the conversation, and the actors mouth dialogues nowhere close to reality. As the movie jumps forward in fits and starts, we only see the characters in a state of heightened emotional anxiety, and this, combined with the constantly stagey and overdone dialogues, distances us entirely from the characters. They may be interestingly fleshed out, but we rarely see enough of their insides to actually care about them. If we finally identify with any of their traits, it is despite them, not because of them. Closer is brutal enough to make you weep, but you won't be crying for any of the characters.

The acting roster is formidable, and Clive Owen leads the pack, earning an Oscar nomination for his marvellous performance. His Larry is cold, ruthless, by turns smooth and jagged, and, to use the euphemism Dan applies to Alice, most 'disarming.' Natalie Portman's Alice is a stripper wallowing in na�vet�, and the young actress copes well with this, the most difficult character of the lot. Jude Law is disappointingly wooden, a character with several loopholes arising from the leaps the script takes, and serves only as a foil for the rest of the cast. Julia withholds the grin and satisfactorily conveys the feeling of simmering beneath the surface, and when she lets fly in a couple of scenes, defiant in her dismay, the film breathes to life.

Which is something Closer lacks for the most part. The film is deep, layered, sharp and scathingly funny. But it's so clinically aloof it makes you shudder.