Bellow the Rainmaker

What made me take this trip to Africa? 

When I picked up Henderson the Rain King to read earlier this month, I was on a Saul Bellow tear. I read Dangling Man and The Victim in July, and The Adventures of Augie March in August. (I read his fourth, Seize the Day, last year). After a detour through Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, I turned to Bellow’s fifth novel. Years before I started on his novels, I had read some of Bellow’s stories, and I wrote about them on this blog: “The Old System” inspired me to write “The Heraldry of Being", “Looking for Mr. Green” led me to write “The Fallen World of Appearances", and “Something to Remember Me By” provoked me to write “Something to Remember Him By”.  

By the time I got to his novels I believed that it was in them that Bellow achieved the highest expression of his gifts. Having read five of them, I have to admit that I’m somewhat disappointed. Dangling Man was a succinct, necessarily limited exploration, set in Chicago, in the form of a diary written during the war by a man who has quit his job while awaiting induction in the US military. The complications (due to his Canadian origins) make his life increasingly difficult and strain his relations with his wife and his family. The Victim, set in New York during a hot summer, is more concentrated, but it, too, is limited by the narrow perceptions of a man whose placid life is disrupted by the death of a nephew and the reappearance of a man who accuses him of ruining his life. 

Then came The Adventures of Augie March, a grand picaresque novel in the tradition of Sterne. But I thought the novel would’ve been better had it been broken in two – the narrative leading all the way up to the reappearance of Thea and Augie’s odd excursion to Mexico is cumulatively brilliant. Everything after it is more diffuse and, for me, far less engrossing. Seize the Day is a short novel, and I agree with the critics who regard it as Bellow’s best. Henderson the Rain King is as satisfying in form – a cohesive, contoured novel from beginning to end. Eugene Henderson asks the question I quoted above at the outset of his story. His life is that of a seeker – he spent most of it looking for something he clearly cannot find. Now in his 50s, his old cook drops dead in his kitchen. 

And I thought, “Oh, shame, shame! Oh, crying shame! How can we? Why do we allow ourselves? What are we doing? The last little room of dirt is waiting. Without windows. So for God’s sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort. You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk. Because nothing will have been and so nothing will be left. While something still is—now! For the sake of all, get out.” 

Henderson can never quiet a voice in him that chants “I want I want.” Not knowing what to do with himself, he impulsively goes with a friend and his new bride on their honeymoon to Africa. In mid-air crossing the Atlantic he marvels: 

And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily. (Joni Mitchell has said that she was reading Henderson the Rain King on a plane, came upon these lines and conceived her song “Both Sides Now.”) 

Henderson separates himself from the honeymooners, takes two of their guides, fires one, and tells the other, Romilayu, to take him off the beaten track. “Me tek you far, far,” Romilayu says. Does he ever. After abandoning their jeep (not practical off the beaten track), Henderson and Romilayu walk for several days. At last they encounter a cattle herding tribe, the Arnewi, whose old queen takes a liking to Henderson. When he sees how their watering hole is afflicted with frogs Henderson creates an improvised explosive device with the powder from his rifle shells. The resulting explosion kills the frogs but also destroys the Arnewi’s cistern. He and Romilayu depart the village before trouble brews. 

They trek farther into the bush until they arrive among the Wariri, whose young king, Dahfu (who speaks fluent English) befriends Henderson. During a rainmaking ceremony, Henderson foolishly wagers with the king that the rain won’t come. Then he performs a weightlifting stunt and is cheered as the tribe’s new rain king, while torrential rains pour down on the village. 

Henderson loses the wager and gets involved in palace intrigue. He discusses philosophy with Dahfu in a lion’s den – the lion is Dahfu’s pet, but Henderson is terrified of it. In fact, as soon as he is obliged to don a diaphanous green costume, still wearing soiled undershorts and a pith helmet, Henderson's comical figure comes lumbering to the fore. Yet he knows too well what a ridiculous figure he cuts among the Wariri. He comes to believe that Dahfu will achieve greatness and bring about a change for mankind. He explains to an uncomprehending Romilayu: 

“Americans are supposed to be dumb but they are willing to go into this. It isn’t just me. You have to think about white Protestantism and the Constitution and the Civil War and capitalism and winning the West. All the major tasks and the big conquests were done before my time. That left the biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death. We’ve just got to do something about it. It isn’t just me. Millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place. Just before I left home I saw an interview in the paper with a piano teacher from Muncie who became a Buddhist monk in Burma. You see, that’s what I mean. I am a high-spirited kind of guy. And it’s the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I’m out here, anyway?” 

Saul Bellow never went to Africa. He didn’t have to. Henderson saves himself from the Wariri and flies home to his family. He has learned what he wants. In the final chapter, he ponders, “Whatever gains I ever made were always due to love and nothing else.” Bellow’s embrace of life is so large that it’s useless to complain if it’s sometimes a little clumsy. Through Henderson, Bellow says, “I am a true adorer of life, and if I can’t reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.”

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Americans think they know how to drink – until they visit the British Isles. The English/Irish traditional pub never really translated into the American bar, but some Americans, in the tradition of Puritanism, are still convinced that we, as a nation, have a drinking problem. 

I thought I was a drinker until I visited Japan. During my eight years in the US Navy, I visited bars all over Asia: in South Korea, Hong Kong (before the handover), Thailand, Guam, and the Philippines. I was stationed in Okinawa for three years and, tired of the crush and hustle of the “drinkie” bars that serviced us servicemen, I favored the far quieter and less crowded hostess bars up and down the side streets of Okinawan city outside Kadena Air Force Base. I frequented the relatively genteel hostess bars, all yakuza-owned, and once spent practically a whole night being entertained by a particular woman until closing time. At 4 AM. When I walked out of the bar, the street was jammed with Japanese men all tottering in the direction of home.

Japanese artists - painters, writers, and filmmakers - have favored bars and the districts where they are concentrated as settings for their work. Among the filmmakers, three of the first generation, who began with silent films in the 1920s and early ‘30s, and who reached maturity in the ‘50s, Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Naruse frequented bars in their domestic, present-day dramas, called shomin-geki, because it was there that men and women found release, but also disappointment. Mikio Naruse was not well known in the West during his lifetime, but thanks to the insistence of Donald Richie and others, his greatness is by now firmly established. In 1960, he made When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, about Keiko, a woman who works as the mama-san in a hostess bar above a narrow street, and it is heartbreakingly beautiful. The woman finds, at a time when she is especially tired of her work entertaining middle class men, her practiced smile affixed to her face, a chance to change her life. She lunges at it, only to be deceived once more. 

The film opens on “an afternoon in late autumn” in Ginza where, so the narrator (Keiko) tells us, “Bars in the daytime are like women without makeup.” Inside a closed upstairs bar called Lilac, a small wedding party is in progress. The women who work in the bar are throwing a farewell party for one of their co-workers, who is escaping the bar into marriage. One of the women, older than the others, says that marriage is what every woman wants. Junko, one of the younger and more headstrong women, denies it. “I’m going to open my own place,” she says. But it costs a million yen, as Keiko knows too well. She has been lectured by the bar’s owner about the revenue dropping for two consecutive months. The reason is as simple as it is terrible: Keiko won’t sleep with her wealthier clients. 

“Between 11:30 and midnight, the Ginza’s 16,000 hostesses head home in droves. The best go by cab, the second-rate take the train, and the worst go off with their customers.” 

From the outside, life in these innumerable tiny bars in Ginza is invariably cheerful, but from the inside it is hopeless. The women who work in them are stigmatized as unmarriageable. Their only chance is to establish a list of customers and canvas their help to open a bar of their own. One of Keiko’s girls, named Yuri, accomplishes this, and even entices away some of Keiko’s customers. But Yuri gets herself into serious debt and tells Keiko she’s going to fake a suicide attempt to ward off her creditors. 

All Keiko seems to do is work in the bar all night and collect debts all day (customers in the bar charge drinks to their tab). What lifts the film out of moralizing melodrama, one that illuminates the restrictive lives of the women while also condemning them for their poor choices (as if there ever was any real choice), is that it never feels fabricated. The Carton bar and the hundreds of other bars like it, is a world unto itself, with its own rules and hierarchies. This world is a cycle of indebtedness today and collection tomorrow. When Yuri’s attempted suicide backfires and she winds up dead (she mixed her nonlethal dose of sleeping pills with brandy), people to whom she owed money turn up at her funeral to collect from her mother.

Keiko isn’t at all the “bad” woman Hollywood would’ve made of her. She is trapped in an inhuman system that gives her no choices at all. Being a hostess gives her independence, but she has to squander her life abiding by the draconian rules of the game. What the film exposes most powerfully is the disastrously constricted life of a Japanese woman, whose only option in attaining a life of her own is through marriage. Keiko married a man ten years older than her when she was just 18. He was a kind man, but he was killed in a street accident, leaving Keiko completely on her own. Her brother’s only son got polio and his wife abandoned them. So she sends them an allowance of 20,000 a month. One of the strange take aways from the film is how ineffectual good husbands are. Keiko’s husband was good to her, but he was hit by a truck. Keiko’s husband was good to his wife, but she left him and their crippled child. Even the man Keiko seems most attracted to, a banker named Fujisaki, turns out to be a shit. The men in her world want only one thing from her, but she resists giving it to anyone, in deference to the memory of her dead husband. She even has a shrine to him in her expensive apartment. When she weakens – only once – she is cheated.  

The cast has a number of familiar faces. Tatsuya Nakadai is Komatsu, the bar’s manager. One would think he’s seen everything and isn’t susceptible to any emotion, least of all love. But he loves Keiko and, when he proposes that they marry and open a bar together, she refuses, telling him they know each other too well. In other words, her cynicism is the equal of his and she is as remote from romantic love as he is. Masayuki Mori is Fujisaki, whose attraction to Keiko is just another aspect of his possessiveness. Once he possesses her, he loses interest. Ganjiro Nakamura is old Koda, who tries to entice Keiko into his bed with the million yen she needs to open her own bar. When she tells him she needs time to decide, Junko, a pretty young hostess, throws herself at him. Junko gets her own bar instead. Daisuke Katsu, one of Kurosawa’s regulars, plays Sekine, a bogus factory owner who proposes marriage to Keiko, except he’s already married. When Keiko is taken in by his proposal and finds out the truth (his wife calls Keiko’s number), she returns to the bar and goes on a bender, winding up in bed with Fujisaki. In the morning, Keiko tells him she truly loves him, despite vowing to never love another man. He tells her he’s been transferred to Osaka. “If you’re ever in Osaka, give me a call.” 

Through it all, Hideko Takamine, who was Naruse’s favorite lead actress, is movingly genuine, putting up a tough front only to protect her unhappiness and longing. She ascends the stairs of her bar in the final scene (she is shown climbing the stairs several times in the film, each time pausing halfway, as if she’s steeling herself for another night of false merriment and broken promises) the sense of the fatality of the moment is overwhelming. Keiko will prevail. 

In a telling statement, Naruse said, “From the earliest age, I have thought the world betrays us; this thought still remains with me … Among the people in my films, there is definitely something of [this] … if they move even a little they quickly hit the wall.” *

* Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1971) p. 73.

Out in the Cold

The sudden media attention to as many as 14,000 Haitians on the US border with Mexico brought back some bad memories – of the colossal 2010 earthquake that demolished much of the capitol city of Port-au-Prince and killed an estimated 200,000 people, of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, of the assassination of the Haitian president in his own home last July, and the latest earthquake earlier this month that destroyed more than 60,000 homes. 

The people displaced by the earthquake who decided that the best survival strategy was to get out of Haiti and make their way to Texas did so not after seriously considering all of the hazards lying in their way but because they knew that those hazards were worth braving if it meant escaping from the homeland that repeatedly failed them. 

Eleven years ago, after the earthquake struck Haiti, probably the one country in the Americas that is least capable of withstanding such a blow, I published a post on this blog called Long Live Haiti in which I wrote: 

For decades, Americans and Europeans have been subjected to pictures on their television screens of the victims of famine, disease and disaster in Africa, Asia and South America. they have had to develop, whether they liked it or not, a compunction regarding people all over the world who have survived floods, earthquakes, wars, and epidemics, only to find themselves without any means of surviving another day without food or water. In a very real sense, well-off Westerners have had to accept some of the responsibility for the world being the way that it is. They have had to face up to the fact that, no matter how far away the disaster had unfolded, they were living in the same world as its victims. 

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It is also the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that was created, in 1804, from a slave revolt. That left Haiti in the unique position of being a virtual African state in the Caribbean, surrounded by European colonies - British, Spanish, and French. Throughout its calamitous history, it has been invaded, annexed, and otherwise exploited by its neighbors - including the United States. Since the ouster of Jean-Claude "Bébé Doc" Duvalier in 1986, Haiti has tacitly been a democracy, but a very fragile and contentious one. It remains as it has always been, desperately poor, beset with murderous paramilitary groups and private armies, an economy that was never stable enough even to be shattered, seasonal tropical storms and cyclones, and now earthquakes. 

The people who have, over the years, grown quite understandably weary of seeing pictures of starving people on their TV screens may never contribute a penny to relief organizations. But whether they like it or not, they are citizens of the same world that makes such suffering possible, the same world that could alleviate all poverty, all famine in the world, but has chosen not to. It has decided instead to pretend that the only solution to these problems is the exportation and promotion of their economic affluence - the "trickle down" effect that will, some day in an unforeseen future, make everyone, if not economic equals, at least self-sufficient. 

When I got out of the Navy in 1995, I went to live with my sister in Aurora, Colorado. I started looking for a job and because she was working in a local hospital, my sister suggested that I apply for an armed security job in the hospital’s ER. She knew that one of the guards was leaving and a few weeks later I had replaced him. One November morning I was working my 8 to 4 shift in the ER when an ambulance brought in a man and woman. The head nurse notified me that one of them, the woman on the gurney, was a combative patient and that I should stand by. The EMTs pushed the gurney into a room indicated by the nurse. The man followed them. The woman was crying out and waiving her hands hysterically. The man was saying things to her in a foreign language. 

After the EMTs gave the nurse their report - that someone had called 911 on a disturbance involving an African-American couple a nearby park. After responding to the call, the police notified the EMTs of a possible psych issue with the woman - the ER nurse went into the room to question the couple. The woman continued to cry out and wave her hands in the air, and the man spoke only broken English. The nurse then told me to keep an eye on them and left the room. The nurse then made a call for a psychological evaluation of the patient. 

I stood by the door and listened to the couple and discovered that they were speaking French to each other. I came forward and said, “Taissez vous!” (shut up) and the woman immediately stopped screaming. They both looked at me, as if astonished. The man smiled and asked me “Vous parlez Français?” 

“Un peu,” (a little), I answered. 

The man then began telling me what had happened to them. They were Haitian immigrants who had come to Colorado from New Mexico by bus. Because they knew no one in the city and couldn’t afford a hotel, they decided to sleep in the open in the small city park. The temperature the night before had dipped below freezing and because they were completely unaccustomed to such cold, and had nothing to cover themselves with during the night, the woman’s hands had been frostbitten – a condition unknown in their tropical country. As soon as her hands became warm again in the morning they began to cause terrible pain in her fingers. I excused myself and went and explained to the nurse what the man had told me. 

Even taking into account their ignorance of English and the seriousness of the woman’s frostbite, it seemed obvious to me that it was the color of their skin that brought about the 911 call, the police response and the presumption of the woman’s mental state. The present crisis on the border, which has lately resulted in a response by border patrolmen on horseback riding down Haitian immigrants on the Texas side of the river, as well as the forcible repatriation of many of the immigrants back to Haiti via military transport, perfectly illustrates how irrational are Americans’ fears about immigration. The swiftness of the response also exposes the racist element behind American immigration policies. 

The obvious solution to the immigration problem is to find a way to improve living conditions for the people in the countries that are commonly the source of immigrants. Enemies of immigration simply don’t care to know what could possibly impel people to risk their lives trekking to the US border. Their arguments about yhem coming to steal American jobs is more than a little preposterous when there’s now a labor shortage in many parts of the country. It seems to me that the number of jobs that Americans are unwilling to work for any wage has grown considerably during the pandemic. The work usually taken by immigrants, like the nightly cleaning of office buildings, might now include many more employment options. Americans aren’t lazy, but their understanding of quid pro quo is, by now, quite sophisticated. If the economy is going to recover, the only question for now is, who else but these immigrants, documented or undocumented, will do the work? 

Shut up and let the immigrants in.

It Never Ends

Twenty years now, 

Where'd they go? 

Twenty years I don't know 

I sit and I wonder sometimes 

Where they've gone 

And sometimes late at night 

Oh, when I'm bathed in the firelight 

The moon comes callin' a ghostly white 

And I recall 

I recall 

(Bob Seger) 

Here we are again, revisiting September 11. Historians refer to the 20th century as the most murderous era ever. It began peacefully enough and with widespread hope that the old nationalistic hatred of the 19th century was over and the machine age would liberate humanity and we would soon enter a paradise on earth. It lasted until 1914, when an anarchist threw a bomb that killed an Archduke and set the world on the treadmill to war. The earthly paradise was shelved. 

The 21st century didn’t give any of us much time to make predictions. There were still plenty of scores from the 20th century to settle waiting in the wings. We were caught napping, drunk with unprecedented prosperity and the illusion that we were insulated from the barbarisms being perpetrated elsewhere, many of which were inspired by our meddling in other countries’ conflicts. The victims of the terror attacks in Manhattan, Washington DC and Pennsylvania weren’t the ones who had it coming to them. It was their ultimate misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The government sworn to protect them let us all down that day, but those people especially. We were carelessly going about our lives in a free and open society. Our government, that was put there to pay attention to threats and neutralize them, shit the bed. 

I miss the world that came to an end that morning. 

Into my heart an air that kills 

From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

What spires, what farms are those? 

That is the land of lost content, 

I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

And cannot come again. 

(Housman) 

But we learned nothing on 9/11. Our response has been an unmitigated disaster. George W. Bush was the worst possible person to have been president at that moment in history. His winning the election was quite possibly one of the factors that led to it's execution. Bin Laden knew he would overreact massively, which he did. Joe Biden finally ended the Afghanistan intervention (while Dubya complained about its implementation), by simply pulling the plug. There was no graceful exit strategy. Comparing it to Dunkirk was actually somewhat justified, since Dunkirk was itself the worst "strategic withdrawal" in modern history. But now that it's over - but for the shooting - what do we do now? 

Closure – the sense of an ending – is for works of fiction. In life the only closure is the coffin lid.

The Comfort of Strangers

Paul Schrader’s film The Comfort of Strangers is easily the best adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel. It is a short book (128 pages) and it was only his second, written long before he developed into a "literary" author. Even so, the novel is sufficiently sui generis to make it more than just a horror story of a young English couple who encounter a pair of Old World weirdos in the maze of Venetian alleys. 

As someone who has never been to Venice, I owe a debt of gratitude to all those novelists, from Henry James and Proust, to Wilkie Collins and Thomas Mann, who used it as their setting. They helped to situate that most illusionary city in our minds. McEwan contributed his novel to this list of fictional Venetian explorations: 

A narrow commercial street, barely more than an alley, broke the line of weatherbeaten houses. It wound under shop awnings and under washing hung like bunting from tiny wrought-iron balconies, and vanished enticingly into shadow. It asked to be explored, but explored alone, without consultations with, or obligations towards, a companion. To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy. 

Under the opening credits, the film glides through an impossibly opulent Venetian house where we see a woman and we hear the voice of Christopher Walken speaking the first lines of the “My father was a very big man” speech that we will hear twice more in the film. Then we see a young man on a balcony of the hotel Gabrielli in the bronze afternoon light. He is Colin. He and Mary are English tourists in Venice. They are unmarried, but have been together long enough to consider going further in their relationship. They spend their days mostly lolling together in their hotel room. 

Though they’ve been to Venice before, they can’t go out very far without a map and can never seem to leave their room until it’s too late to find an open restaurant or even a street food vendor. One night they forget the maps in their room and get lost looking for a place to have a meal. They encounter Robert, a resident of the city, who leads them to a bar. While Robert tells them his story at the bar, they drink a lot of wine, and when they leave they simply decide to sleep in the street. On waking, they find their way to the great plaza (Saint Mark’s), but can’t manage to get even a glass of water. Robert finds them there and insists they accompany him to his house. They take a boat taxi to his villa on the Grand Canal (we were shown its interior under the opening credits). 

Next we see Colin and Mary lying naked in bed in an exquisite room. Unable to find their clothes, they must improvise. They meet Caroline, about whom Robert told them the previous night. She is his Canadian wife, and they sit in the waning light of the day talking. When they leave, Caroline makes Colin promise to return. Colin and Mary return to their hotel and make love passionately for days, not wishing to see Robert and Caroline again. Mary tells Colin she was shown a photograph of him taken covertly by Robert, and Colin tells her how Robert punched him in the stomach. 

They go to the beach on the Lido, past one of the old immense hotels that figure prominently in Mann’s Death in Venice. Trying to get back to their hotel, they find themselves across the canal from Robert’s house and when Caroline sees them and calls to them from her balcony, Colin and Mary reluctantly go across to the house. It is there that the strange, ritualistic murder of Colin takes place in front of a drugged Mary. It is both shocking and rather predictable. In such an unreal setting, nothing can quite seem too outlandish. 

In his New York Times review of the novel, John Leonard remarked that its story had already been told, and better, by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. The film reminded me more, however, of Nicolas Roeg’s cult horror film Don’t Look Now, also set in Venice and which also climaxes with the male protagonist having his throat slashed, but by a dwarf with a meat cleaver. The script was written by Harold Pinter, and he concentrates on Robert’s many speeches, which always sound like he composed them long ago and simply repeats them to everyone he meets. Christopher Walken is Robert. In the book he is “a squat man,” dark, sinister: 

He was shorter than Colin, but his arms were exceptionally long and muscular. His hands too were large, the backs covered with matted hair. He wore a tight-fitting black shirt, of an artificial, semi-transparent material, unbuttoned in a neat V almost to his waist. On a chain round his neck hung a gold imitation razorblade which lay slightly askew on the thick pelt of chest hair. Over his shoulder he carried a camera. A cloying sweet scent of aftershave filled the narrow street. 

Walken, who can’t help being mesmerizing, makes Robert blonde and much more attractive, even affable, than the character in the book. He’s a man who is convinced that he can’t explain the details of his life (or justify himself) without going back to the beginning, and telling the same story in the same words over and over. Walken is splendid, but quite miscast. 

So, in her own way, is Helen Mirren as Robert’s Canadian wife, Caroline. She is one half of the sado-masochistic couple, the one who submits to Robert’s brutality because she learns to accept it as what was somehow coming to her. But she was injured so badly by him they had to find another subject for the infliction of Robert’s murderous sadism. They happen on Colin, and, as the many photographs they have covertly taken of him reveal, they chose him as their next victim. Mirren has acted with power before (she played Queen Elizabeth), but here she is powerless, yielding, voluntarily helpless before Robert’s brutal dominance. 

Natasha Richardson is Mary. As impossible as it is to see her and especially to hear her without thinking of her glorious mother (Vanessa Redgrave), she is an undeniably lovely and grounding presence in the film. In the book, Colin has the curls in his hair. Mary does in the film, and Natasha Richardson’s golden ringlets seem to be unnaturally constant. 

Rupert Everett’s physical beauty is remarked on too often in the film. There are moments when he reminds one of a face and figure from a Renaissance painting, but I think he looks uncannily like he stepped out of an Egon Schiele portrait. Too modern for Raphael. 

Then there is the fifth element of the film, Venice, the most magnificent stage set in the world, against which so many writers have enacted their tales – tragedies (mostly). The film’s DP, Dante Spinotti, manages to wring several fresh views from some of the most well known scenery in the world.  

Even fans of Paul Schrader must admit that he has had a spotty career as a director. If I remember correctly, I liked his first film, Blue Collar. But since then, the only film to his credit as a director that I liked was Affliction, despite the silly “moral” tacked on to the ending. 

The final scenes of The Comfort of Strangers, including the climax, were changed in the film: in McEwan, after Caroline rouges Colin’s lips with blood from her own bloodied lip, Robert, holding Colin by the throat, kisses him passionately, then he slashes Colin’s wrist, not his throat. Mary remains paralyzed while Robert and Caroline move their luggage, stepping through the large pool of blood surrounding Colin. And in the book Mary doesn’t see Caroline in the police station, nor are we shown part of Robert’s interrogation or his final speech, repeating the film’s opening speech, “My father was a very big man... ” Despite its miscalculations, The Comfort of Strangers is a film well worth watching.