`Closet Land' Lacks Reality, Human Touch

X 1/2 ``Closet Land,'' with Alan Rickman, Madeleine Stowe. Written and directed by Radha Bharadwaj. Metro, Lewis & Clark, Kirkland Parkplace, Gateway Center 8.``R'' - Restricted, due to language, violence.

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``Closet Land'' - Radha Bharadwaj's feature debut - is a message without a movie, a salvo launched toward too vague a target.

It opens with things going bang in the night and closes with a statement from an Amnesty International report: ``Today over half the world's governments use torture against their own citizens.''

In between, it outlines the dehumanizing psychology of torture.

The trouble is, it's so abstract that it doesn't tell us much. It has so little specificity that it comes across as cool, abstract, lifeless. Unless you buy into the notion that torture is the same the world over, ``Closet Land'' is going to strike you as being oddly sealed from its subject matter.

On the other hand, it has a distinctive visual style, some imaginative sound design and two capable performers.

Madeleine Stowe (``The Two Jakes'') is a children's book author who has been arrested and held for questioning without access to a lawyer. Alan Rickman (the fashion-conscious villain from ``Die Hard'') is her interrogator, and there's no ploy too devious for him to use. Their encounter - and the entire movie - takes place in a futuristic Art Deco holding cell, with Ionian columns thrown in.

His goal is to make her admit that her books are subliminally subversive. Stowe maintains that they're ``harmless, cheerful pieces of fluff.'' She has, she says, no political ideas at all. Rickman doesn't believe her, but concedes: ``It's better to have no ideas than half-baked ones.''

That's the launching point for a cat-and-mouse game that is alternately predictable or absurd. Stowe and Rickman are ciphers - all-purpose stand-ins for cunning tyrant and valorous victim.

The essay-like script feels as if it was written by someone who's never been in the predicament described. By divorcing her film from any social reality, director Bharadwaj is able to make her point - torture is bad - with neat simplicity. And that's the problem.

There's been no shortage recently of films about the workings and psychology of totalitarianism and political persecution. Volker Schlondorff's ``The Handmaid's Tale,'' Michael Verhoeven's ``The Nasty Girl'' and Carlos Saura's ``Ay Carmela!'' all touch on questions of brainwashing, persecution and torture, using bold, stylized approaches in treating their subject matter. But they also include quirky human moments that make their worlds recognizable - and all the more disturbing.

``Closet Land'' 's downfall is in separating its message from its context to a point where nothing human comes through at all.

It leaves you in the dark.

- Michael Upchurch