Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It is very strange to my mind that such a celebrated director as Raoul Ruiz is making straight-to-video movies in the UK! However the English-language world has a goldfish memory for foreign giants and so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. Maybe he needs to get Spike Jonze or Quentin Tarantino to "sponsor" him ^^. Nucingen House didn't even get a DVD release, so we shouldn't look a gift horse in the eye with this one.So we have an art critic living in a country pile who has gone blind following some nasty maiming. He wishes to publish a final book and thus sets about hiring an "amanuensis" to assist him with this. Tom Conti plays the role of blind critic Paul pretty well, he has just the right mix of pomposity and fragility. The film is quite surreal, but nowhere more so perhaps than when we see a selection of self-absorbed characters interviewed for the position of amanuensis. In this country we never really hailed the arrival of the Surrealist movement, which is perhaps strange as we are about as surreal as it gets. So surreal that we understandably have problems rising out of the fog and making well-realised films about ourselves, although Patrick Keiller's London and Peter Greenaway's The Falls are notable successes. Yes the UK is a nightmare of prejudice, public conformity, self-repression, snobbishness, and reverse snobbishness; all the more bizarre as it's totally unenforced. British lives collectively are a myriad of uncorrelated banalities. We live in post-colonial anomie. Another example in the film is the political canvasser who is timid and petrified at the idea of engaging with someone on a non-superficial level, even if that were to be a well-to-do blind man, and even if that were, ostensibly, her mission. Our politics are quite funny, although we have again an ostensibly socialist party in government, it's just come to light that, in effect, Tesco are able to pay to get proposed legislation torpedoed! The amanuensis (Jane) is eventually selected and is played by Darryl Hannah. She's fairly clearly hostile to him from the start, but is gentle enough in resting demeanour that it's clear we're seeing a vendetta from an aggrieved party, rather than the acts of a psychotic. There's a lovely example of female passive aggressive behaviour here, which, as someone who is as pompous as they come, though with a strong twist of self-deprecation that most don't ever seem to get, I have experienced myself. Jane sits listening to the usual enthusiastic and self-indulgent discourse, carefully choosing her moment to burst his bubble, when Paul mentions that it was always a bad thing to do for writers to drink, she coldly brings up Bukowski and Hemingway.There is camera-work here, though the movie is obviously a quickie. The best example would be when the camera floats dreamily as we are told of Princess Diana's appearance in Bhutan. The opening shot of the spires of the pile are suitably surreal, however the atmosphere of the very comfortable gentrified interior is in contrast to that making the opener look slightly contrived. Being a quickie we also have a generic soundtrack over the top, which must have taken all of half an hour to select and edit in during post-production. I doubt anything was shot twice in the movie either, hence the zoom shots when Paul takes his glasses off, which are a bit silly.For people who care about such things, the twist at the end regarding the critic himself, was pretty obvious in the first act if you are used to looking at paintings with anything other than a blank stare, or have knowledge about the meaning behind the travel itineraries of British men.Though this is a quick production, done with a minimum of fuss and cost, there's enough artistic value to make this worth a watch. You even get to hear a good recital of the poem Jenny by James Henry Leigh Hunt.

I have just finished watching the film and as I have never read the book, I viewed it with no expectations. If you're after action a fast paced movie then this probably isn't for you as the drama unfolds at a slow to medium pace. Tom Conti and Daryl Hannah do a pretty good job in the role and are the glue that hold the film together. I won't go into what the film is about as that would render it pointless to watch but I will add that this is the not the kind of movie that you can watch over and over again but will find satisfying for the one viewing if you like suspense mysteries. In conclusion, it's not the best film i've seen, but I did enjoy it so I gave it a 7.

In the vein of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane or Misery, the movie A Closed Book deals with a woman who is mentally torturing a blind man. Daryl Hannah is virtually unrecognizable as the (for whatever reason) unemotional person who has ulterior motives who is hired by a blind author to help him write his autobiography. Hannah looks like a cross between Catherine O'Hare and Loretta Swit, if they were both on Lexapro on bad hair days. Too bad she didn't revamp her role in Kill Bill: that would have been scary. Tom Conti has a few good moments as the blind author, but his character is ultimately a confused mess, at one point highly acute to sounds and smells (even though he's only been blind for a few years), and at the next point completely helpless and stumbling over his own feet. But the most distracting flaw in Conti's character is that he has eyes that don't even exist, with skin that has grown over the sockets like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. Now how can we believe that? Why not just give him empty holes or ghost white eyeballs or something else that is believable? I was looking forward to seeing what Ellen Page had to offer to this film but to my disappointment the actress turned out to be someone named Elaine Paige. Guess I should read the credits more closely. We never find out what happened to the housekeeper and the ending comes out of left field as intensely as a wiffle-ball. There was some real potential here to do some really creepy things and if they had played upon the theme of claustrophobia and the fear of the dark, they might have delivered some tense moments, but unfortunately it turned out to be an average night of off-Broadway theatre.

Saw this in a preview today. If you like Sleuth, then this is a poor man's relation. Very theatrical, and in fact best suited to the stage than the big screen, this film documents the mind games played out between a reclusive blind author and his new live in assistant. Daryl Hannah can't act for toffee in the latter role but does please the boys by getting her kit off, although how it advances the plot defeats me....Tom Conti plays the eccentric art critic author to a tee, and holds the whole thing together...just! Elaine Paige plays a very strange cameo role (the casting in this film is a little odd to say the least). Lots of Gothic overtones and a creaking old mansion in the country fit the stereotyped mould of the film but at least if doesn't overstay its welcome at 90 mins. Suspend disbelief and ignore the plot holes, and the film is weirdly enjoyable....