Illogical Passion -- The Story Of A Brother, Sister In `Close My Eyes'

XXX 1/2 "Close My Eyes," with Alan Rickman, Saskia Reeves, Clive Owen, Karl Johnson. Written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Metro Cinemas. "R" - Restricted, due to language, nudity, scenes of incest. --------------------------------------------------------------- Asly, freewheeling comic melodrama that takes place in a doomed but sunlit world, "Close My Eyes" touches on AIDS, global warming, drugs, infidelity, urban rot and mid-life crises.

But mostly it's about the absurdity of an illogical passion - specifically, incest. It's the story of an attractive brother and sister who can't keep their hands off each other, and also can't avoid replaying their childhood roles even when they're in bed. She's older and she never lets him forget it.

"You keep telling me where to sit," says the lover she calls "little brother." He gets increasingly irritated, and tantalized, by her advice. "Whatever you do," he announces during a particularly stressful phase, "don't tell me to pull myself together!"

This inevitably disastrous relationship takes awhile to get started. Raised separately by their estranged parents, the siblings have never been particularly close, but their paths keep crossing. When the film opens, Richard (Clive Owen) is an insolent, eternally tardy, swinishly successful young architect, while the unhappy Natalie (Saskia Reeves) is suffering through a series of worthless jobs and relationships that have given her a severe inferiority complex.

Not until Richard has reversed his career goals and Natalie gets married to an heir to a margarine fortune (Alan Rickman) do the siblings decide they're made for each other. Richard's new status as a poor but professionally uncompromised enemy of rapacious land developers has made him more attractive to her, while her sudden material success fascinates him.

She even dares to be four hours late to lunch - one of his old tricks - and she breaks the tension by kissing him passionately, then protesting that this must not go further. Fat chance. For the rest of the movie, they're trapped by this mutual compulsion, while she tries to break it off, he desperately tries to find an alternative, and the husband becomes increasingly bewildered.

Written and directed by the prize-winning British playwright, Stephen Poliakoff ("Breaking the Silence"), "Close My Eyes" was partly written for Rickman, who has appeared in a couple of Poliakoff's plays and regards him as an original "who inhabits a world no other writer does."

Rickman won the best actor prize at this year's Seattle International Film Festival for this role (and his part as the annoying ghost in "Truly, Madly, Deeply"), and he gives a charmingly eccentric performance, full of easy wit and grace as well as submerged pain (he's very touching when he pointedly declines to confront his wife with evidence about the affair).

Yet the movie belongs to Reeves (Antonia in Beeban Kidron's "Antonia and Jane"), who deftly suggests Natalie's obsessive, guilty nature, and Owen (the star of Kidron's "Vroom"), who shifts easily from careless ladies' man to concerned lover - at his most vulnerable when he admits to his sister that he's never been desperate about anything before.

"Close My Eyes" is forever on the edge of becoming a steamy, overblown soap opera, yet Poliakoff always breaks the sexual tension by introducing absurd touches. His lovers play with the notion of running off to Mexico to write a bestseller to support themselves, or they demonstrate their passion by grappling on the pavement of a busy road.

Poliakoff has directed only one other film (1987's "Hidden City," still unseen here) but he has already established his own recognizable style as a filmmaker. It's all a matter of tone. When you're in his hands, you can't help smiling at a straightfaced declaration like "Unless we're careful this is going to end badly."