The men can't read the women, who are trying to tell them what they think the men want to hear but can't always guess right. Sometimes the guys want to be conned, or say they do. And the women can be very good at it: at her show, for instance, Anna explains away her shadowy chat with Dan by telling Larry that Dan's father has died and immediately turns the situation around with a crack conwoman's skill: "Were you spying?" What moves the story along as much as anything are the moments when the women alternately lie and tell the truth when it would have been better not to do whichever it is they've just done. (Although the men might not have been any happier with the alternative.)

The seeming inevitability of miscommunication is clearest in the strip club where Larry pays for private "entertainment" with Alice and tries to break through her provocatively impenetrable bewitchery. He throws large-denomination pound notes at her to get her to tell him her real name. He thinks he already knows the answer, that he's a step ahead of her, and so fails to recognize the truth when she tells it to him.

Thus, the characters in Closer divide by sex (though hardly in solidarity) and also line up too neatly for naturalism—arranged by occupation they cover the ground from most "dead" to most "alive," or perhaps most "unconnected" to most "present": obituarist, photographer, dermatologist, stripper. At the same time, the characters are not only allegorical personifications of socio-sexual traits but differentiate quite clearly. Nichols helps root the play's stark confrontations in evocative film settings, and, in a similar vein, his actors blend their particularized characterizations right into Marber's shrewdly dramatized generalizations. It's as if Pinocchio had become a real boy while remaining an expertly crafted object in wood.

The late-night club scene, for instance, features an emblematic face-off between inconsolable man and inconsolable woman. Nichols shoots the strip joint as a hermetic, sleazy underworld of electric pastels, blue and pink, where you can see the smears on the mirrors. It's a synthetic fantasy of debasement, a circle reserved for self-hating horndogs in a Dantesque Disneyland. But it also looks the way dives look in the wee hours when you feel like Larry and Alice do. The sequence is thus also a believable face-off between Larry, the most dominant character at his weakest moment, and Alice, the most wounded character at her most controlled.

Larry spots Alice in a bubble-gum-colored wig and pays for her time in the Paradise Room, one of eight so named. Alice recognizes Larry, too, but refuses to act out her emotions about their defecting partners, or to help Larry act out his. Larry feels that the professionally teasing Alice is playing with him wantonly—as if a woman intentionally arouses every inflection of what a man projects onto her. Reacting to her as elusive "woman," an impassive archer-goddess, he calls her cold at heart, which is exactly wrong. She's the tenderest body in the movie, and the least adept at amorous sport. (She doesn't think love is a game, sport, war, which may be why she keeps losing.) She's cold only to the touch, especially of someone whose intentions are as suspect as Larry's. Yet Alice is also the most fiercely independent character of all. This seems to be why she can work at a strip club, because the clientele can never "touch" her.