Incest But Good: Close My Eyes 1991

Close My Eyes is a 1991 film written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff and starring Alan Rickman, Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves as well as Lesley Sharp and Karl Johnson. Music was by Michael Gibbs (who would also provide the music for Poliakoff’s next film, Century) and the film was produced for Beambright and FilmFour International by Therese Pickard.The film won the Evening Standard film award for best picture in 1991.

When a husband begins getting the awful feeling that his moody wife is having an affair, the last person he suspects is her younger brother. Offbeat is hardly the word for this engrossing British drama.

The film is largely a grand-scale re-working of Poliakoff’s earlier stage play Hitting Town in that the main plot remains one of brother/sister incest, although the film also covers the chaos (as the film sees it) that was the initial stages of the London Docklands development, the late 1980s recession and attitudes towards AIDS. A parallel thread running through the movie is the rapacious replacement of the classical by the modern, represented visually by old and new buildings.

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