A year later, it is revealed that Dan finally succeeded with Anna the night of the exhibit and both couples blow apart. They continue to cross paths, however. In one sequence, Larry turns up unshaven and miserable at a strip club where Alice has gone back to work. In a subsequent sequence, Anna joins Dan late for a performance of Così fan tutte because she had to meet Larry to get the divorce papers signed, an encounter we see in flashback. In both instances, we later learn, Larry takes the seemingly fraying plot in hand and maneuvers everyone in the direction of his or her weakness, to Larry's own advantage, but also, he thinks, to everyone else's, except Dan's.

That's it. The plot is intricate — a lot of maneuvering in ten scenes and an epilogue that jump ahead in time without titles to keep us oriented — but not insistent. At the end, one couple has "survived" and the other hasn't. The script evinces a frankness about what people in love will do to each other that borders on rawness, but it doesn't feel like pure naturalism, that is, a study for its own sake of what these individual characters do in this particular situation.

Rather, Marber emphasizes the different ways in which men and women play the game of love and how their ill-matched sensitivities work against them. The key premise is that what we mean by civilization requires that women possess the sexual power of saying yes or no (as Larry points out to Dan in their end-stage confrontation). A concomitant is that it's generally up to men to pursue women, which makes men emotionally vulnerable to women's power, as firmly as they may accept that it's right for women to possess it.

For their part, women are physically and sexually vulnerable to men, and may be economically dependent as well, and are, for these good reasons, more cautious. The paradoxically accompanying result is that women may take the tense trickiness of love in stride, as differently as they feel about it: Anna is more practical and tougher than Alice, for instance, who can't believe when the bomb explodes even though she's heard it whistling towards her from the first scene (when Dan told her he had a girlfriend, right before he asked her name).

The women in Closer want permanent connections — which is different from being suited to maintaining them. Anna may consistently want to have a child but changes her mind about who the father will be. The men, on the other hand, are always drawn to excitement, challenge, though they certainly do not want things to change, except on their own initiative, of course. Marber seems to accept (guiltily?) Anna's statement that "men are crap" when, post-come-on, she hears Dan has a live-in girlfriend (meaning, in that instance, Alice).