The Comfort of Strangers

So much is written in Hollywood about a character's ‘redemptive arc'-it is rare that anything redemptive crosses our path in a Paul Schrader movie, and we wouldn't want it any other way.

Let's talk about real life, life ala Schrader and Pinter---rarely redemptive, where a dismantled woman (Natasha Richardson) in her late twenties, divorced, burdened with child and confusion, looking ahead to 40 years of loneliness, seeks solace in one of the few options left available to her: the younger, good-looking, yet far too effeminate suitor (Rupert Everett).

Their pairing, unsettling at most every juncture, can only be upstaged by a spectacular Chris Walken performance as Robert, a predator of confusing lineage who smells blood in the water faster than OJ can smell the first tee.

It is the character Robert on whom the SNL parody `The Continental' is likely based, and Walken plays him so flawlessly that we may sometimes believe he has something but the basest on his mind, which of course, he has not.

Helen Mirren is perfect as Robert's co-dependent compadre.

Ignorance is never bliss in this day and age, and our story of a young couple indeed destined to suffer the consequences of their needless existence twists and turns tautly in their ill-timed venture to Venice.

Looking for fun? Next time, kids, try Disneyland.

Let's think how to put together the all-star team of menace.

We'd have Paul Shrader direct, and he'd never shoot a centered, straight-on angle. The movie would be filled with nearly empty frames, where the actors can be seen only far off to the side, and the scenes would begin with tracking shots through an alley to the characters, as if from a stalker's P.O.V. Doors and windows would open and close near our protagonists, manipulated by unseen hands, for unspoken reasons.

We'd have Harold Pinter write the screenplay, and every line would be pregnant with vague menace. The character's actions would be filled with unexplainable and unexplained malice. People would repeat with gravitas lines that don't seem important. People would tell awful stories about their youth and their excessively stern parents.

We'd locate it in Venice at night, where every corner seems to turn into a deserted and foggy dead end, every street is a waterfront, and there are as many ghosts and echoes as living people.

We'd star Christopher Walken.

Sorry, guys, it's already been done. This is a spooky, creepy movie, well presented by the all-star team. I really found only one flaw. The menace was not left unspoken and threatening. The movie ends with people doing explicit and unspeakably awful things for no reason.

It's one strange movie. Great use of Venice as the backdrop for the story. It is a masterpiece in its own Euro-noir genre. I liked it a lot, but don't expect a typical cinema experience, or a happy ending.

This film established for me conclusively that Paul Schrader was an aesthetician rather than a thoughtful artist, after other stylish trips into the lives of drug-dealers, gigolos, etc. Not in the same way that Michael Mann is, but, well...

For a period in the early nineties I noted that the movies which provided insufficient answers and portrayed unlikeable characters would first p*ss me off, and then draw me back in after a month or so to reinspect it for evidence I'd missed; Plenty, Comfort of Strangers, others.

While ambiguity can be stimulating, this seems to be just a tease. Either the characters in this world are operating according to some undisclosed rule, or some obscure theme links it all. I have what I believe is an accurate thesis about why this numb, vacationing English couple endures the awful Walken and Mirren more than once, but it's facile and barely worth pursuing as a discussion or as a movie.

Beyond the triumvirate (Schrader, MacEwan, Pinter) working overtime to be inscrutable, Rupert Everett fails to bring his A game to this, or engage with anyone; Richardson, the schoolgirls, his inexplicably peevish orders not to scratch. There's also some strange gay intertextuality in Everett's casting, as a straight man who unwittingly becomes the target of another (ostensibly) straight mans attention. Not since Quentin Crisp played Queen Elizabeth will you have been this confused. No, it wasn't well-known at the time that Everett was gay, but Schrader would have known. Perhaps it's a short list of young straight British actors who look terrific unclothed as the script requires here. The deliberately unengaged quality of the couple is not served well by Everett's lack of engagement due to being gay playing straight. This layering conflates the themes and causes really mixed results; readings are muddied almost immediately.

But I'm very aware and appreciative of the beautifully designed camera work; the linking shots, establishing shots, and of course long developed sequences are among the most beautiful pieces of celluloid I've ever seen. Ditto for Badalamenti's ravishing, ominous score.

There are some beautiful, filmic moments in it. Robert loses the cameras attention in the middle of his tiresome story and we go for a trip around a swank bar. At first there are only men (oh, it's gay bar...) then a man applies chap stick, then a mannish woman flirts with a guy (hmmmm... it's not a gay bar), then an isolated red, curly-haired woman is dwelled on. I have no idea what it means and what Schrader was out to achieve but the sequence stays with me in a way the more narrative pieces of the film just sit there. Perhaps in another better movie it would add up to more. Here these moments just seem to fight the narrative.

After twelve years of scouring this movie for meaning, I give up. It's just not satisfying as a story, a parable, etc.. This is a frustrating, zero-steps-forward-two-steps-back endeavor. Together novelist McEwan, screenwriter Pinter and director Schrader crafted an emotional fog of a movie that deliberately posits problematics, but hints at few answers. Colin and Mary's six or seven scenes of idle chatter are badly directed and positively grating, something to be endured rather than enjoyed; consuming the dramatic arc alive. You could mix the scenes up and play them in any order you like and you still couldn't develop a viewers interest.

For deliberate ambiguity played well, just rent Last Year at Marienbad.

This Paul Shrader movie is a 'must see' for anyone who's enjoyed 'Don't look now' by Nicholas Roeg. Once again we're back in Venice where decadence, decay and danger seem to lurk in every ill-lit corner. Just barely hiding from our eyes, but omni-present in the atmosphere.

We see Colin and Mary, a not-so-young and not-so-happy couple that have come back to Venice to decide whether or not to continue their relationship. The only plausible question to that answer seems to be a sound NO, until they meet Robert and Helen, an older couple living in a palazzo at the Grand Canal. Robert and Helen are weird, to say the least. Their marriage being a perverted mixture of violence and lust. Robert (Christopher Walken) could be a character from a James Purdy novel: a closeted mucho macho gay man who can only satisfy his need to be physically close to another man through violence. Masochistic Helen is not at all the victim she seems to be.

But who are the real perverts here? The clearly kinky older couple or their younger 'friends', that can't seem to stop having sex after their unsettling encounters? No need to tell that there can be no happy ending to this tale.

The Comfort of Strangers is a work of art. The chilling atmosphere is tangible, the characters are very convincing, the dialogue by Harold Pinter is multi-layered and the plot is slowly moving to its inevitable conclusion without the interference of a weak-hearted writer.

It makes you think about the million different methods people use to keep their lovelives alive. The movie also is a very brutal way of saying that nothing in life comes for free. By exaggerating the price Colin and Mary have to pay, Shrader seems to make us want to think about the more ordinary prices we pay in matters of fidelity, lust and love.

"The Comfort of Strangers" sounds superb on paper. Ian McEwan's brilliantly devastating and profoundly disturbing novella adapted by the genius that is Harold Pinter, directed by the excellent Paul Schrader, scored by Angelo Badalamenti, and starring what is essentially a dream cast absolutely perfect for the material. Yet it has a mediocre reputation at best so when I settled down for the viewing I was hopeful but had low expectations.

Pinter and Schrader handled two things poorly here- the ending, and the introduction of Christopher Walken's character, Robert. I'm not usually too concerned with faithfulness to the source material but what McEwan did with both aspects in the novella definitely did not require any sort of alteration. McEwan plays with the comfort level of the audience and characters more than Pinter does, causing the story to be even more sinister and disturbing as it develops. Pinter begins the film with a voice-over narration by Robert and we see Robert in flashes well before meets Colin and Mary and takes them to his bar. In short, we are told explicitly that Robert is a villain from the opening of the film, and Pinter also lets him take a bit too much screen time away from Colin and Mary. Walken is excellent in the role, however. The ending, while disturbing and unforgettable in the novella, is a predictable and simple conclusion on film. There's also one or two things that happened during the climactic scene that don't make sense at all within the narrative of the film and which did make sense in McEwan's book. Another questionable alteration.

Other than those faults "The Comfort of Strangers" is an absolutely tremendous and amazingly involving film with a brilliant script by Pinter which allows for more nuanced characters and a different approach than McEwan's novella featured, and superb work by Paul Schrader as director, who uses Venice brilliantly her to create mood and ambiance and certainly shoots the film very, very well, with one scene, where Robert is discussing his relationship with his father and sisters with Colin and Mary in the bar which is shot stunningly well. I won't give away Schrader's use of imagery here but it is such a well-crafted scene that the version in my head of the scene seemed terrible in comparison. The film is also shot exceptionally well by Dante Spinotti, a quality cinematographer famed for his work on films like "Heat" and "L.A. Confidential" among others.

Complimenting Schrader's work, which is probably his most impressive outside "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters", and at times superior to that, is one of Angelo Badalamenti's most memorable and distinctive scores. I actually had Rupert Everett in mind for Colin well before I even knew this film existed and he didn't disappoint at all in the role. Natasha Richardson was out of left field for me but the casting worked spectacularly well here, and it goes without saying that Helen Mirren is superb as Robert's wife Caroline. Mirren's Canadian accent is spot-on as well.

"The Comfort of Strangers" is significantly less heady than its prose version, choosing to function as a thriller with some thematic preoccupations instead. What is surprising about this film is just how well it works as a thriller. The novella thrives on an atmosphere of tense, sinister unease but much of that is derived from Colin and Mary's relationship rather than any plot mechanics. This film is more a traditional thriller but it is tremendously tense, involving, and exciting from start to finish. A quality film, one of Schrader's best as director and some of Pinter's finest film work.

9/10